And the winner is ...

Trio, the digital cable-satellite network whose motto is “pop, culture, TV,” has declared December Awards Mania Month and, if nothing else, it may be praised for bucking the Christmas trend that holds sway everywhere else. To supplement and dignify the “acquired” content that makes up most of the month’s programming -- including thematically appropriate reruns of “Queen for a Day,” screenings of all three versions of “A Star Is Born,” a couple of old “Miss America” pageants and an “encore presentation” of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show inherited from its corporate cousin the USA Network -- Trio has commissioned a pair of original documentaries on the subject of institutionalized self-congratulation in the Business called Show.

These are clever projects, in that -- like awards shows themselves -- they allow the network to assemble stars, in this case through archival footage, otherwise beyond its reach. The tone in each case is arch, and the matter something less than revelatory, though it is certainly surprising to learn that there are currently 565 entertainment-industry awards shows, 100 of which are televised -- most of them, of course, in the farther corners of the digital spectrum.

“The Award Show Awards Show,” which debuts Sunday, is by and large an intelligent survey of the subject -- points awarded for use of words like “schadenfreude” and “tangential” -- though at 90 minutes it feels at once too long and oddly cursory. Efficiently narrated by Oscar winner Tatum O’Neal, it is a somewhat rambling parade of facts, factoids, infamous episodes and well-stated if obvious points, among them that merit is not always the measure of an award, that the ultimate purpose of an awards show is to confer glory upon the giver and that major awards can mean major money.

The human impulse to glorify is glancingly related to Roman coins and Catholic saints -- glancingly being the only way you could make those connections -- and posits the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, each meant to remake the image of the man who gave them his name, as spiritual fathers to the Oscars, et al. We relive Susan Lucci’s famous losing streak, Frank Sinatra’s truncated Grammys speech, the Martin Scorsese-Robert Wise-Miramax mini-scandal of last year’s Oscar race and Pia Zadora’s astonishing best new star Golden Globe, an award so suspect that CBS subsequently dropped the broadcast. The workings of the red carpet are plumbed. In the ironic youth cult mode of recent MTV-VH1 pop culture documentaries, comedians are asked for comment, the problem here being that none of them has anything funny to say.

The Zadora incident turns up again in the hyperbolically titled “The Golden Globes: Hollywood’s Dirty Little Secret,” directed by Vikram Jayanti and premiering Dec. 14. Notwithstanding the erudition of its talking heads, including producer Michael Phillips, critic John Powers and filmmaker Chuck Workman, it purports to rip the lid off the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., a self-protective cabal whose several dozen members -- only a third of whom are full-time journalists -- are the entire voting body for the Golden Globe awards. But this lid was ripped off long ago, as is demonstrated by the fact that the show’s only footage of actual members comes from a 7-year-old edition of “American Journal.”

Denied access, Jayanti resorts to filming himself being denied access and opts instead to trail press association wannabe Jeannie Mortensen, a star-struck Danish TV reporter who is either made or allowed to look foolish and in either case does not seem to merit the treatment.

However much of a sham they may be -- and as Powers observes, “Even though the Golden Globes people are by and large idiots, they often make better choices than the Oscars” -- the Golden Globe Awards have, after all, proved reliably good television, the only awards show to maintain the popular fiction that Hollywood is a place where stars sit down and get drunk together.

That the film, television and music industries thrive on promoting such illusions and self-delusions should be news to no one.

The fact is, as New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman, who investigated the dubious credentials and strange workings of the Foreign Press Assn. when she was at the Washington Post, tells Jayanti, “People know, and they don’t care.”

*

‘The Awards Show Awards Show’

Where: Trio

When: 9-10:30 p.m. Sunday

Narrator: Tatum O’Neal

What Else: “The Golden Globes: Hollywood’s Dirty Little Secret,” airs 9 p.m. Dec. 14

Executive producers (“The Awards Show Awards Show”), Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato.