Common sense would dictate the receipt of an award is met with statements of gracious appreciation by the winner. And when the award is presented to a well-known writer, it is
safe to assume a certain level of eloquence would be on display. Last month, three famous writers greeted news of award victories with an unusual range of verbiage. Should their
reactions earn them an additional prize for Good PR, or did they put their feet in their mouths on the way to the award podium, thus earning a Bad PR prize?
| The PR Focus | Good PR or Bad PR? |
|---|---|
| While many people were surprised that "Crash" beat "Brokeback Mountain" for the Academy Award as Best Picture, few people expressed their open
disapproval as boldly as Annie Proulx, the author of the short story that inspired "Brokeback Mountain." In an article in the British newspaper The Guardian, Proulx referred to "Crash" as "Trash" and castigated the "conservative heffalump Academy voters" who voted for the racially-tinged drama instead of the gay cowboy romance. |
BAD PR: Conservative heffalumps? Proulx also sliced some cheese to go with her sour grapes vintage: She denigrated Philip Seymour Hoffman's
Oscar-winning performance in "Capote" as "mimicry" and then fired a completely irrelevant volley at the rap number from "Hustle and Flow" that was the surprise winner for Best Song (in case you forgot, the title was "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp"). The Oscars always divide movie fans, but the mean spirited comments by Proulx gives sore losing a bad name. |
| Last month also saw Chris Ransick being named the Poet Laureate for the city of Denver. Ransick, the author of the books "Never Summer" and "A
Return to Emptiness," used his new poetic platform to comment on the craft with this statement: "I would say that there is some poetry out there that escapes me, and I've been living for decades. Maybe they (poets) have forgotten their audience and are doing it more to please themselves." |
BAD PR: Can you think of a more inappropriate way to celebrate poetry than to criticize contemporary poets? To his credit, Ransick announced
plans to spend more time with youth groups and cultural centers to spread the magic of poetry, but those earlier comments were wildly out of place. Denver's previous poet laureate never made such remarks. But then again, that poet (Albelardo Delgado) received the title posthumously in September 2004. |
| Mixing science and religion is often equivalent to mixing gasoline and matches, by the judges for Great Britain's prestigious Templeton Prize
honored cosmologist Dr. John D. Barrow with the $1.4 million prize. He lightly joked he is too young to win the highly regarded award, noting: "People are usually a great age when they win these things." Dr. Barrow celebrated the possibility of science and theology sharing a state of peaceful co-existence rather than bitter conflict. |
GOOD PR: Wow, an award-winning writer who doesn't use language as a means of intellectual suicide! Let's just have Dr. Barrow speak for
himself: "Our scientific picture of the universe has revealed time and again how blinkered and conservative our outlook has been, how self-serving our interim picture of the universe, how mundane our expectations, and how parochial our attempts to find or deny the links between scientific and religious approaches to the nature of the universe." |