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I'm writing this now from the renovated Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Blvd, the sidewalk behind my breakfast banquet table thick with a double row of stars embedded in the concrete, “Some that you recognize, some that you have hardly even heard of…” as the Kinks’ song goes.

The Cove team has been busy picking up awards recently on both coasts, Critic's Choice and LA Film Critic's Best Documentary on the West Coast and three Cinema Eye Awards in New York. Last night, producers Paula DuPre Pesmen and Fisher Stevens were honored for best-produced documentary by the Producers Guild of America.

I couldn't be happier with the mounting accolades for the film, but to me the trophies are really the collateral of what happens when we try to solve the issue.  It raises awareness for the issue and that is a great thing for any documentary.  I've told our team from the beginning, we're trying to make a movement more than a movie.

At Critic's Choice the programmers had Food Inc Director Robert Kenner and I and some of his team sitting next to each other at the same table.  We agreed that awards competition brings healthy attention to our respective issues, which in our case are partly overlapping.  However, we feel that the documentary filmmakers are more collaborators than competitors.  The fact that anyone is even talking about our lonely outpost of the solar system seems to be uplifting for everyone making them.  As we hover on the fringes, sharing the glow of the big movie stars and their Hollywood mega hits, it's nice that our little films can orbit for a few minutes around in the vast Hollywood Nebulae.

Picking up awards in LA for The Cove we shared the stage with Jeff Bridges, George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Paul McCartney, Carey Mulligan, Wes Anderson, the Cohen Brothers, James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow.  Truth be told, it's actually the same award we hold - the very same award.  After they hand it to you up on the podium with great pomp and spectacle, teary eyed recipients thanking everyone from their mother to their agent, you are whisked backstage where a couple of beefy guys in all black suits and ties wearing those secret service ear peaces pries the trophy from your grips.  It turns out they only have one award made up and they have to use it for the next award winner.  "Got it," one says to some invisible producer in a back stage control room, and just like that you're hurtling back to Earth like some dazed astronaut who’s both happy to have made the journey to be back safe on solid ground.  The only thing to show for it is your fingerprints on some piece of glass and metal that is now in somebody else's teary hands.

The manager of the Roosevelt Hotel gave me a tour of the hotel yesterday and showed me a room that was the site of the first Academy Awards ceremony where the Oscar was first given.  I was told that first ceremony lasted 8 minutes. I had no idea our slightly dingy hotel had that kind of pedigree.  There was a conference being set-up for California tourism and a gentleman was putting up a kiosk for SeaWorld by one of the big double door entrances.  I was reminded that our real reward will come when cetaceans are awarded their freedom and killing them for meat becomes one of those dark chapters in the history of man's evolution as a species.

Until then, to everyone who has ever supported the cause, hopefully we will get there before our stars turn to dust.

For the Wild,

Louie