Porn Valley Dispatch: The XRCO Awards

April 25, 2006
LANK

Do you know what it's like to screen a porn movie every business day for almost three straight weeks? (What am I talking about? Of course you do. How foolish of me, Baroness.) It begins to affect one's expectations of the world. Imagine my embarrassment today when, instead of filling up my Honda, I pulled the nozzle out and pumped 15 gallons of gas all over the hood.

"That may contain MBTE, bitch," I said.

Having recognized a problem when I saw one, tonight we'll eschew the usual movie reviews that have been appearing in this space and talk about the XRCO Awards instead. Mind the gap. - G. Ponante

****

At 22, the annual X-Rated Critics' awards are a little bit hoary. Held in a part of Los Angeles (Century City) that I hadn't visited since the last XRCO Awards, the astmosphere is chummier and much less frenetic than the AVN awards. In terms of production value, it nicely counteracts AVN's annual Vegas fiasco by trying too little, thereby never raising anyone's expectations. This feeling is helped along by the fact that it's free.

There is no better mollifying agent in porn than the realization that only one's time has been ill-spent.

Not that the evening wasn't a good time; it's just that the good time wasn't happening up on stage, and few people were paying attention.

Co-founder Bill Margold, in a Hall of Fame segment, introduced Mark Davis, Kylie Ireland, and Keisha. The other two honorees didn't show. Margold, who performed in porn movies back when people were being arrested for doing so, looks a little sadder each year as the job of reminding the audience that porn was once illegal becomes more historical than immediate.

("But that might change," he said recently.)

The winners list was mercifully short under such conditions and, again superior to AVN, there was little grumbling about "purchased" awards. The awards themselves were thin, heart-shaped pieces of wood with gold-leaf nameplates glued to them.

It's unfortunate that the XRCOs, which don't have a cloud of cynicism about them (I became a member of the voting body after the voting period ended this year), should be a less-heralded affair. Every winner (among them Hillary Scott for Best New Starlet and Orgasmic Oralist and Katja Kassin for Orgasmic Analist) made sense.

There were also moments of grace (Kylie Ireland and Randy Spears) and drama (unhappily-matched co-hosts Stormy Daniels and Lauren Phoenix) that made the evening entertaining.