Gift Bag Blues

If you look a gift horse in the mouth in Hollywood you might just find an IRS agent lurking behind a tonsil. The Tinsel Town goodie bags brimming with all sorts of baubles, bangles and Blackberrys given to award show presenters are now taxable income that must be reported. And why not? The haul is estimated between $40,000 and $100,000 -- or somewhere around the box office draw of Ben Affleck's last movie. Apparently, all those extravagant parting gifts caught the eye and the ire of the head of the IRS, who probably makes in a year the equivalent of a single bag of swag.

I doubt the tradition of giving stars exorbitant rewards just for showing up will be fading out. It's just going to take on a new form. A 1099 Form, probably tucked in with the free trips to Hawaii and Lasik surgery and those $280 Stud Monkey jeans.

Oh, the humanity! Those poor presenters! Toiling through Sunday afternoon traffic, having to pirouette before a gauntlet of cameras, opening envelopes with a high degree of paper cut probability, all now with tax ramifications! How will they find anyone to read the prompter in a timely fashion? Will we be doomed to hours of B-listers like Carmen Electra and Eric Estrada or anyone from Manimal? Perhaps Richard Hatch could do it once he's paroled for not paying taxes on his Survivor winnings.

What is most irksome is that those who can most afford it, don't have to. For example, I once worked behind the scenes at an award show. I wore a little black dress purchased at Target (back when the French pronunciation was the sarcastic equivalent of the silent "t" in Colbert Report). Buying that dress added up to more out of pocket expenses for me than for every starlet in a Vera Wang, or a Oscar De La Rental or a form fitting green sequin disaster, since none of them paid for their attire. Although the relative amount of material used by an actress in a size two and me in my never-missed-a-meal size, should be factored in. Why is it that these swag bag recipients who so easily drop $180 on a completely non-descript white t-shirt from some paparazzo stalked store manage to get all sorts of stuff for free? It's like an inverse proportional bizzaro world math equation. The more money you have, the less they make you spend.

One report had the IRS claiming that they'd lost out on $1.2 million in back taxes because of these goodie bags. That ought to pay for about an hour of Martha Stewart's prosecution. And you just know the IRS decided the jig was up after they watched the tough guy on the Sopranos whack the hell out of Lauren Bacall for her gift bag. Let's hope the IRS doesn't use that as their model for regaining lost revenue.

I am no stranger to the goodie bag having on occasion been invited to the type of soiree where, to paraphrase Woody Allen, 80% of the point is just showing for the parting gift. I put a clock on it. I call it gift bag 30. Thirty minutes after I see those little shopping bag come out, I'm out the door clutching my sack of stuff. Of course, in my low rent world of parties, the gift bags is filled with boobie prizes: a month old magazine I already read, a 3/4 milliliter bottle of tap water, a jar of make-up so off-color it could only be used by tanning bed addicts and a tube of some sort of emollient so past its expiration date they could easily be confiscated by a TSA agent as a terrorist threat. Even a homeless shelter would reject this stuff if you tried to re-gift it.

Perhaps this weekend the Emmy committee should take a page from every Mom throwing a party for an 8 year old. What's better than a goodie bag chock full of sparkly magic-markers, super-double bubble gum, 2 comic books and a sheet of glow in the dark Sponge Bob stickers. And kids, don't forget your 1099.

By Stephanie Becker