During the recent ''Golden Bell'' Television Awards last month in Taipei — Taiwan's equivalent to the Ameican ''Emmy'' Awards — Mr Huang Ming-chan, who won one of the top prizes in the director categories, gingerly walked up to the stage and snapped cellphone photo of himself (over the shoulder) while approaching the podium.
The 40-something director then took out another cell phone from his other jacket pocket and started reading email messages of congratulations and smiling to himself, totally ignoring the audience, before finally addressing the 5,000 people in the auditorium — and on national TV — by reading his acceptance speech from the screen of his iPhone.
Mr Huang's Golden Bell acceptance speech performance might just have made international televised award-show history, by not only replacing a prepared speech on paper with a written screen text on his phone.
For snapping his own self-congratulatory photo as he was handed the award trophy, he deserves some other kind of prize, too. But what should it be called?
Said Sophie Chen, a 25-year-old graduate student in communications at Chung Cheng University in south Taiwan: "I think it was okay for him to take his own photo as he got the award on stage; that's cool, but ignoring the audience for a few seconds while he rather arrogantly checked his own phone messages on stage seems a bit impolite to me. Reading his speech from his phone screen was also cool, I thought. I'm sure this will start happening at the Oscars next year, too. The technology is here already!"
Is this a new trend just getting started and could it swamp the Oscars telecast in 2012? Stay tuned — on your iPad!
