Emmy finalists! Read the names right here! Or don't.

In a world where presidential campaigns last two years and the Christmas shopping season starts on Labor Day, I suppose it was inevitable that even something as dreary as the Emmy race couldn't be contained to two months. The Academy of Television Arts And Sciences released the 10 finalists for best drama and best comedy Friday. The acting finalists weren't released, probably so the academy can make a big deal out of it next week and get twice the bang for its worthless buck.

DRAMA

Boston Legal

Damages

Dexter

Friday Night Lights

Grey’s Anatomy

House

Lost

Mad Men

The Tudors

The Wire

COMEDY

Curb Your Enthusiasm

Entourage

Family Guy

Flight of the Conchords

The Office

Pushing Daisies

30 Rock

Two and a Half Men

Ugly Betty

Weeds

If there was the tiniest, most infinitesimal doubt about the sheer stupidity of the Emmys, the presence The Tudors -- dull and silly even by the standards of the soft-corn porn it is -- should dispel it. But Hollywood voters put it there anyway. Now so-called blue-ribbon panels will screen the finalists and pare them down to five nominees, to be released July 17, unless my prayers are answered and a comet strikes the Earth.

Emmys? Already? The exercise in tedium gets even LONGER

There's almost nothing less significant in the world of entertainment than winning one of the hundreds of Emmys awarded each year. Well, okay, one of the thousands of nominees for an Emmy is even less significant. And now, we're on the verge of a whole new dimension of pointlessness: The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, which runs the Emmys, is considering releasing a list of shows ALMOST nominated for an Emmy.

No kidding. Because GoldDerby.com, a show-biz award site run by my pal Tom O'Neil, has managed to obtain a list of the top 10 vote-getters the past couple of years, the academy may release the list itself Friday, a week after the first round of voting ended. Tom, an intelligent, energetic and resourceful journalist whose troubling obsession with the Emmys sometimes makes me wonder if he's been zapped by some kind of mind-control ray from a passing UFO, writes that "it's a good idea to disclose the top 10 finalists in order to increase interest and excitement in the annual Emmy derby." If he persuades the academy, I'm guessing the next step will be the release of a list of people who wanted to win Emmys.

You really *#@#! like me

Everybody from Howard Kurtz to the Daily Kos is complaining that Fox censored Sally Field's Emmy speech Sunday night to suppress her anti-war views. Great conspiracy theory, but the fact is that the Fox censors didn't cut away from the speech until she used the word "goddamn." They did exactly the same thing earlier in the evening when Ray Romano used the F word and when Katherine Heigl mouthed an obscenity that I still haven't figured out. At a time when the FCC is more aggressive levying large fines for televised obscenity, yet still murky about defining just what that is, Fox was concerned not with politics but pocketbooks.

Could the network have just bleeped the words instead of cutting away altogether? Yes, and it should have -- as I wrote in my Sunday story, the Fox censors were clumsy. But they were just as clumsy at handling Romano and Heigl as they were with Field.

I'm also more than a little bored by the twin assumptions that Rupert Murdoch is personally involved every time somebody at one of his businesses sneezes, and that his business empire is a fascist monolith relentlessly pursuing right-wing political goals. Is The Simpsons a right-wing show? What's the right-wing purpose in the self-circumcisions and teenage three-ways on FX's Nip/Tuck? (And why has the Parents Television Council, which consistently labels Nip/Tuck the worst show on TV, not gotten the message?) What about The Day After Tomorrow, Fox's paranoid 2004 global-warming movie?

Murdoch's conservatism is incidental to his fundamental goal in life, which is to make ungodly amounts of money. He doesn't care that Sally Field denounced the war, only that she might have cost him some loot. If there really is a culprit here, it's not Murdoch but the FCC.

And for those who reallllly wanted to see it, here's her speech without any bleeps.

I TOLD you the Emmys were boring

The preliminary data from Nielsen show that Sunday's Emmy telecast had the smallest audience since 1990. Just over 13 million viewers watched the Emmys, down 19 percent from last year. And the show even got beat by the NFL game on NBC -- at least 13.3 million and probably a lot more watched the Chargers and the Patriots.

Profiles in Tedium: The 59th Emmy Awards

It was a night of Pyrrhic victories and bittersweet sendoffs Sunday at television's Emmy awards, where voters named departing mobster series The Sopranos TV's best drama but snubbed its cast, and bestowed a flock of awards to a network lineup devised by a programming boss who's been fired.

As Paul Harvey says, and now for the rest of the story...

I feel mind-numbing boredom coming on...It must be time for the Emmys

Here's a preview of tonight's Emmy awards. Don't say you weren't warned.

Emmys!

Here's a story on Thursday's Emmy nominations, which includes a shocking discovery that Neil Patrick Harris made when he Googled himself. Don't try this at home, kids.