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A message to all, leading into this year's awards season: Don't give Woody Allen any awards. He won't show up anyway. 

Nellie Andreeva at Deadline reports that Allen will not show up to accept his Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes this year. Andreeva said she had heard that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association decided to honor the director without getting a guarantee that he would attend.  

Allen's likely MIA status is not in any way surprising. He's notorious for not showing up for these type of things. He did show up to the Oscars in 2002, after 9/11, not to receive an award, but to honor New York.  "For New York City, I'll do anything," Allen said. 

But that was a distinct anomaly. Here, for instance, is that time he won the best director prize for Annie Hall. Where's Woody? Not there.  


He also didn't come when he won the best original screenplay prize for Hannah and Her Sisters or Midnight in Paris. His disdain for awards is philosophical, biographer Eric Lax told NPR: " It's really almost impossible, as he puts it, to judge art, that it's so subjective, you can't really say, well, this performance is better than that or that writing is better than this and that, if you get caught in that trap of relying on other people, however great they are, to tell you whether you're any good, you're either going to consciously or subconsciously start playing to that group." 

One might think that Woody might have shown up (or have been forced to show up) for the DeMille Award, since it's big enough an honor. Andreeva remarked that she couldn't "think of a recent instance when the recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Award did not show up." But, alas, Allen will likely not. His persistent anti-awards attitude begs the question: why give him an award in the first place? The answer is: don't. There are plenty other deserving people in the industry who will actually appreciate the honor. Jodie Foster, for instance. 

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