Tony Castro Won for Entertainment Feature
His paean to the late author Tom Wolfe’s Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby ode to the California car culture chronicled the Ferrari VRRRAHVRROOORAAAEEEAAAEEEEHHH! and Hollywood’s unrequited love affair — objectifying, worshipping it and turning it into a glorified sex symbol much as it did Marilyn Monroe.
By Mikala Hutton
Los Angeles Monthly in its maiden year won the top prize for best entertainment feature writing at the 66th annual SoCal Journalism Awards presented by the Los Angeles Press Club Sunday night at its dinner gala at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel.
The award was won by writer Tony Castro’s feature headlined “If Marilyn Had Been a Car, She Would Have Been a Ferrari” with the award judges’ commenting, “What an entertaining story about the Ferrari and America’s intrigue with the car in television and movies throughout the decades.”
The awards are handed out by the Los Angeles Press Club, which previously said that more than 2,300 entries were submitted this year.
Castro is a writer-at-large and national political writer for LAMonthly.org.
His winning story may be read here
At the ceremony, the LA Press Club bestowed honorary awards upon actress Jane Seymour, ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich, Fox 11’s Amanda Sala and the National Press Photographers Association’s Mickey H. Osterreicher.
Smith, who won the Joseph Quinn Lifetime Achievement Award, called the honor “the most important and gratifying honor of my professional career,” and he urged journalists “to keep standing up for the truth” and against subjective interpretations of the truth in these uncertain times “when facts and truth and journalism seem to matter less.”
Castro is the former award-winning Los Angeles columnist and author of eight books including the landmark civil rights history Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America, which Publishers Weekly acclaimed as “brilliant… a valuable contribution to the understanding of our time.” Chicano Power (E.P. Dutton, 1974) will be republished in a 50th anniversary edition in late 2024.
He is a former board member of the Los Amgeles Press Club.
ENTERTAINMENT FEATURE, Film
Tony Castro, LAMonthly.org, “If Marilyn Had Been a Car, She Would Have Been a Ferrari” https://bit.ly/49ZO7Bq
Judges’ comment: What an entertaining story about the Ferrari and America’s intrigue with the car in television and movies throughout the decades.
2nd: Lauren Huff, Entertainment Weekly, “Turning back the ‘Dial’: Harrison Ford examines the legacy of Indiana Jones as he caps a historic run”
3rd: Rebecca Rubin and Brent Lang, Variety, “Disney’s Harsh New Reality: Costly Film Flops, Creative Struggles and a Shrinking Global Box Office”
