Any chance we have to ooh and ahh at our favorite celebs and over our favorite entertainments is welcome, particularly as we recover from the cavalcade of distressing news we got this week. Enter the Emmy award nominations.

But these noms should also inspire some amount of awe for putting on display the tremendous shifts happening on the boob tube.

First, we have the talk of the town: Netflix. The one-time snail mail DVD service (and Qwikster… remember that?) has made history with a best drama nomination for its original series House of Cards. In fact, it earned a total of nine nominations, including recognition for acting. It helps when you’ve got Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright in the cast. The fact that a Netflix series can attract that kind of talent speaks to the depth of broadcast entertainment and the willingness out there to try something new.

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We know that PR firms love winning awards and telling people that they’ve won awards, so we think our readers will be very interested in today’s “tips and tools” guest post courtesy of Kevin Swanepoel, president of The One Club. The Club, a non-profit organization created to champion and promote excellence in advertising and design in all its forms, produces events like the One Show, One Show Design, One Show Interactive and One Show Entertainment.

Here’s the golden rule for winning an award: make sure your work is great. Simple enough — but even if you have the best product, service or creative work in the world, you can trip up your entry with practical mistakes that delay or taint a submission that might have been a winner. Consider the following tips in order to give your submission the best chance of winning:

1. Avoid the “Shotgun” Approach:  This may sound strange coming from someone whose organization thrives on a large pool of awards submissions, but submitting an entry for all categories under the sun won’t improve your chances of winning and may weaken them instead.  Some entrants believe that if they submit their work for consideration in six categories, their chances will improve sixfold! The reality, however, is that judges are people who are susceptible to desensitization and annoyance.  If they see a good submission in the correct category once, it’s fresh and original.  If they see it five more times, it becomes trite and even overbearing.

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Have you heard of the Webby Awards? No? Well then: established way back in 1995 when we still used a dial-up modem to access our Prodigy account, the awards were created by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences to honor creative individuals doing great work in the digital field: websites, online ads, videos and all other kinds of content. This year’s deadline for nominations is Friday.

Academy members include Harvey Weinstein, David Bowie and Martha Stewart, and past winners have been as diverse as Björk, YouTube, Stephen Colbert and, for some reason, Jimmy Fallon. Oh and yes, the Webbies were once known as “The Oscars of the Internet.”

This year for the first time, the awards include a suite of social categories to celebrate “the diversity of content, brands and people that use social media as a fundamental component of their identity and communication.”

Sound familiar? If you have a client (or firm) that created a particularly excellent content, marketing, or other social media project this year, it will only take a moment to nominate them. We have a feeling they would appreciate it. But make sure you do it by the deadline this Friday!

Apologies for bringing your attention back to the 2012 election, but you may recall this Mitt Romney quote from the first presidential debate in which he criticized President Obama’s focus on “clean” energy:

Turns out that Tesla, at least, has the last laugh: the company’s Model S all-electric sedan just won Motor Trend‘s Car of the Year award by unanimous 12-0 vote. The Model S is the first electric car to win in the 64-year history of the award, and its victory signals an industry-wide shift toward hybrid and electric models–if not on the road, then definitely in the design studio.

Lest we think Motor Trend simply followed the flock in making this decision, editor in chief Ed Loh stated that the magazine’s editorial board didn’t choose the Model S simply because it lacks a combustion engine; it also happens to the be the fastest and one of the quietest, best-handling American sedans on the market.

And about that Mitt Romney “loser” quote: No one at Tesla commented on the matter before the election, but designer Elon Musk, the mind behind the Model S, managed to get a final dig in after his Motor Trend victory, stating:

“In retrospect he was right about the object of that statement, but not the subject.”

Mee-oww.

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity today handed out its PR awards and, once again, PR agencies didn’t make a good showing.

PRIME Stockholm took home a Silver Lion for its work with a group called Plumbers Without Borders. And MSL Nordic (an international office of MSLGroup) took home a Bronze Lion for a P&G detergent campaign.

But the PR Grand Prix went to an ad agency, JWT Puerto Rico, and its campaign for Banco Popular. An image of the big prize winners along with the jury president, Weber Shandwick vice chair Gail Heiman, is attached above. For that campaign, the firm got the band El Gran Combo to re-record one of its hit songs, “No Hago Más Ná,” (“I Do Nothing”) with a message about hard work. It was a multimedia campaign with a sponsored concert, a hit song, and more. Click here to enjoy some of their wonderful sound.

Once again, Heimann says PR firms had problems presenting their work in a compelling way. According to the Cannes Lions, there were 1,130 entries in the PR category this year, up 38 percent from last year.

The Webby Awards will be giving this year’s Lifetime Achievement award to New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, citing his work with Bloomberg L.P., which began a decade before the ubiquity of digital technologies we use daily.

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We’re seeing lots of news about award winners. Here’s a round up for your bragging pleasure.

The Diamond and Gold SABRE Awards have been handed out. Among the winners were GM and Weber Shandwick for Excellence in PR in the C-Suite; Starbucks and Edelman for brand building; and IBM for B-to-B marketing. A list of SABRE winners is available here and here.

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The Shorty Awards were handed out last night at the Times Center in New York, with award winners including New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg for Foursquare Mayor of the Year; Justin Bieber for music; and Occupy Wall Street for activism.

Hosted by The Daily Show‘s Samantha Bee and hubby IRL Jason Jones (left). According to the couple, they were happy to host and “honored to be away from their kids.”

A list of all the winners is available here and photos from the event have been posted on Flickr. (Separate from the awards themselves, this awful thing happened after “The Misadventures of an Awkward Black Girl” won. Shameful and disgusting.)

Still not sure what all the fuss is about? Click through.

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The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have put together a challenge to communicators worldwide to take two pieces of paper and “help change the world.”

Grand Challenges Explorations: Aid is Working. Tell the World asks any individual, team, agency, or company to submit a communications idea simply expressed on just two pages of A4 paper. The brief calls for “new and innovative ways of telling the real story behind global aid.”

Up for grabs is $100,000 for the development of your idea, and the chance to be mentored by the Grand Prix Winners from Cannes Lions 2011 — top advertising and communications professionals from around the world — a group dubbed the ‘Cannes Chimera‘.

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Leave it to the PR people at Challenger, Gray and Christmas to throw a wet blanket over our workplace fun.  According to the employment outplacement firm, we’re going to spend a hell of a lot of time online at work this month, hogging bandwidth, cheering, crying, and finally setting fire to our March Madness Bracket printouts.  But what of the other things that need to be promoted in a winner-take-all format?

We’ve assembled five other brackets for your consideration, three of broad appeal and two of local interest to show the varying ways we can heap adoration or scorn on the things we follow.  Pencils ready?

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