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There’ll be no swaggy swag at the Oscars or Golden Globes, courtesy of my buddy Edward Norton. The awards have discontinued giving out gift bags — which are are worth up to $100,000 — because Edward complained so much, and the IRS found out about this policy.
Norton tells New York magazine: “Picking through $35,000 gift baskets is disgusting and shameful. My suggestion was to have the Academy commit to charitable contributions in the name of the winners.” Way to piss off alot of out of work or struggling celebrities, Ed. I’m sure there will be plenty of ‘thanks’ to you in hundreds of interviews. The past few years, the gift bags have really stepped up, with the sponsors getting HUGE plugs on TV on the show, interviews, and the thousands of newpapers and magazines. I am a huge Edward Norton fan, but this is hard to defend. If you didn’t want a gift bag, then graciously accept it, maybe sell it on ebay, then donate it to a charity….done deal. He will not be known as the guy that made great movies, he’ll be the a-hole that got the gift bags taken away. |
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Comment by Star News on 9 January 2007:
Hilary Swank gave up gift bags:
Hilary Swank is supposedly set to surrender all the swag she’s gathered at awards shows over the years as part of her 2007 New Year’s resolution. Swank, who started off as a literal starving artist, finds it funny to now be flushed with free stuff. “Now, I’m getting all these free things thrown at me and it’s so strange,” said Swank of her change of fortune. “My New Year’s resolution is to get rid of some stuff because I bring it in and I can’t get rid of it. With my background, and how I grew up; I didn’t grow up with a lot of stuff and now I just have this terrible thing.” Similar to Swank, actor Edward Norton has been crusading to cut the Oscar swag bags. “A lot of us have talked to the Academy Awards producers about this and I think they’re actually going to scuttle the gift baskets and that kind of stuff,” Norton said. “I mean the gift baskets, worth amounts of money that a low income family could live on for a year, [are given to] people who have so much already. It gets depressing.”
Comment by LS on 24 January 2007:
Way to go, Ed! He is sooo right!