Career awards now have life of their own

For all its reputation for unpredictability, this much is true about the entertainment business: By the time you turn 50, you will have a minimum of one lifetime achievement award.

If you don’t, you should have taken your family’s advice and gone to law school.

What once was a prestigious honor recognizing decades of pioneering work has become a cottage industry of gush. Cliched, hyperbolic honors are handed out at award shows like swag to an industry that loves to love itself.

Obscure film festivals award them to get stars to show up. Fundraisers promote them so people will buy tables. Third-rate award shows use them to lure stars and filmmakers who can’t be called “an artistic genius” too many times.

Leonard DiCaprio got a Lifetime Achievement Award at age 30 from a film festival in Santa Barbara. Clint Eastwood, still at the top of his game, seems to get one every week, as if he’s headed for a rest home, including one recently from the Directors Guild of America.

Michael Jackson has at least seven, and probably more. I’m not counting his “Bestselling Pop Male Artist of the Millennium” that he received at the end of the last one, in which he left in the dust every troubadour in 16th century Europe.

Shirley MacLaine has a batch of them on her mantel -- including ones from the American Comedy Awards, the Denver International Film Festival and, last month, the Palm Springs International Film Festival. If anyone deserves multiple life achievement awards, it’s her.

Then there are the Grammys, scheduled for Wednesday at Staples Center, where lifetime achievement awards are given out by the truckload. At a special ceremony, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences will award seven to the living and dead.

All told, the real tally is 13 or 14 actual people, if you take into account that there were three members of the British rock group Cream, and the folk group the Weavers had four, with a fifth musician who sometimes sat in for Pete Seeger.

There’s something to be said for honoring people sooner than later when they work in a business in which the average lifespan is constantly under siege from sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.

But like most award shows, the Grammys started small, then suffered a bad case of swelling kudos.

It began by honoring a single artist, Bing Crosby, with a lifetime achievement award in 1962. For the next few years, the limit was one person. Who could argue with honoring Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Elvis Presley?

Then the awards multiplied like rabbits. NARAS chief Neil Portnow defends it as a serious process in which only the best get through a “blue-ribbon committee of experts” that filters out the undeserving for trustees.

He says the awards are given out in a poignant ceremony that means a lot to the musicians and their families. In November, he says, Richard Pryor was genuinely moved when he learned trustees voted to give him one for his comedy albums. Pryor died Dec. 1, and his family plans to accept.

Portnow also argues that the Grammys remain one of the few life-achievement love fests that still has some cachet. In other words, a lifetime achievement award with the name “Grammy” on it is a lot better than the generic brand. That’s all well and good. But last year a record 10 were awarded, including two of them to entire musical families.

One can only wonder if the guys in Devo will wear those goofy red helmets when their turn inevitably comes up.

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James Bates is deputy entertainment editor at The Times. He writes Behind the Screens as a regular column for the Envelope (TheEnvelope.com), a Times website devoted to Hollywood’s award season.