Everywhere You Turn, It’s Been a Stupor Bowl of Gimmickry

Some audiences you can understand.

NBC’s Golden Globes Awards telecast was the week’s most watched television show, for example, because 22 million-plus groupies were aching to see entertainment’s finest vamp, fawn and preen in their finery across three hours of tedious but bankable camp fostered by an ambiguous outfit known as the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn.

Then more than 17 million tuned in the blathering tweedledums and tweedledees of Fox’s “Temptation Island” on Wednesday, titillated by the prospect of seeing a record number of lobotomies on the screen at the same time.

And in the U.S. alone, a TV crowd of about 130 million suckers is anticipated for Sunday’s Super Bowl XXXV, all of them wondering if the Baltimore Ravens versus the New York Giants can be as nasty and bruising as the heavily promoted CBS meal ticket that follows--”Survivor: The Australian Outback.”

What do these 800-pounders have in common besides girth, popularity and garish profits?

Each is an epic, air pumped from a trifle. Each exploits a TV nation desensitized and beaten down by the sheer tonnage of gimmickry now stampeding like cattle across the airwaves. Each is the product of crescendoing buzz by the Darth Vaders of media and Madison Avenue.

As for Super Bowl marketing, its hucksters’ most brilliant coup was their first, in shrewdly attaching Roman numerals to this annual championship Sunday and inscribing it with as much historical oomph as the Caesars themselves.

Now that the Golden Globes show is a colossus in its own right--go figure--it may want to follow the Super Bowl’s example, starting with next year’s 59th annual awards. Golden Globes LIX projects a nice, deeply chiseled permanence.

In a sense, the fame of the Golden Globes is even weirder than half the nation watching the Super Bowl after being summoned to the set by a high-pitched whistle that usually only dogs can hear.

Who can account for the influence of the Golden Globes? Just as Zsa Zsa was famous for being famous, the Golden Globes are important, well, because they’re important. In other words, if they weren’t important, they wouldn’t be important. Which is why they are important.

They’re embraced by studios as a marketing tool and trumpeted in movie ads designed to goose box-office sales. And Sunday night’s winners tramped to the podium to giddily accept their trophies and praise this goofy little press group--capped by telecast producer Dick Clark and Elizabeth Taylor impersonating Regis and Kathie Lee--without seeming to notice that the TV emperor had no clothes. Blotto. Not a stitch.

The old saw about the roughly 80 members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn.--feed them lunch or a party and they’re yours--may not be as true anymore. And not that all of the U.S. regulars are so pure either.

But still, who are these guys--surely a bunch are part-timers--whose blessings are so coveted by so many in the industry? The Lithuanian tailor who strings for a weekly back home? The Moroccan limo driver who files a blurb every month or so? The Aussie who specializes in gossip? Probably even most of the winners are in the dark about precisely who is anointing them.

Not that it makes much difference, for the Golden Globes are here indelibly, having become an awards force second in TV popularity only to the mighty Oscars, with the U.S. media, including this newspaper, falling in line by continuing to feed the fatty.

That parade of celebrities does the trick. And once gaining a foothold on TV, such events as the Golden Globes assume lives of their own independent of their veiled origins, and thereafter cannot be dislodged from popular culture.

In that way, the Golden Globes is a microcosm of the Super Bowl.

Just where did this fable originate?

* The one that the Super Bowl--usually contested by two teams most of the U.S. couldn’t care less about--somehow seats you at the 50-yard line of Americana.

* That this national camaraderie in front of the set with your fellow Norman Rockwells is not hollow, fleeting and artificially induced.

* That the game is not the sum of its commercials.

The true purpose of the Super Bowl is to rope in as large an audience as possible for commercials, which should be no epiphany. Serving viewers to sponsors has always been TV’s main agenda. It’s the lasagna of hype--layer upon layer expanding to the far reaches of cable--that makes you upchuck these days. ESPN, a 24-hour sports network, can be excused for bearhugging the Super Bowl. What else have these wisecrackers to do with their time when not practicing their smirks in front of a mirror?

Yet the rest of the media buy into the Super Bowl myth, too, even while sometimes ridiculing it. There on CNN Wednesday, for example, was affable anchor Lou Waters, sticking it to the media for hitting Tampa, Fla., on Media Day like lions slamming into wildebeests. “They ask every stupid question in the book,” he said, a charge that would have been weightier had CNN not had its own people there asking questions, too.

Yet just as Americans gather around their TVs as a transient community on Super Bowl Sunday, so does much of the media unite with the sports industry they cover with the singular purpose of selling this game to the multitudes and giving it a sense of urgency.

The TV program with the largest audience ever was the 1996 Super Bowl on NBC, some part of which was seen by more than 138 million, most of whom probably are hazy today about who was playing. But all will remember how important it seemed, at the time, that they watch.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted by e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.