Literary awards boost career prospects

ROSALES. Radical and confounding shift.

WHEN WE conduct scriptwriting workshops, we advise our students to consider joining literary tilts to help fast-track their progress as promising writers. We share our own experience with the Palanca awards, where we copped six honors in six years of competition, making senior writers curious about this new tyro in their midst.

True enough, quite a number of our workshoppers have also ended up winning awards, and they agree that the attention and acclaim they got did indeed boost their career prospects.

We share these notes, because the Palanca literary awards’ 65th edition is currently calling for entries, and this year’s hopefuls have until April 30 to join. Visit palancaawards.com.ph for rules and other specifics—and, lots of pluck and luck!

More unsolicited advice

It’s great that some of our stars have become wealthy and prosperous even beyond their fondest dreams—but, they shouldn’t mistake prosperity for corpulence and downright fatness. This Easter, let our many overweight stars’ resolution be to intensely wage their personal battle of the bulge—and win!

If they vow to lose as little as five pounds a month, they’ll be able to get back to fighting trim before the end of 2015—and 2016 could end up being their best year yet! Message received— loud and clear?

“Bridges of Love” has cast Carmina Villaroel in an “unexpectedly daring” (for her) role—as a female executive who falls for Paulo Avelino—but ends up in the arms of his adoptive dad, Edu Manzano.

Before that, her first husband (Lorenzo Mara), Edu’s top business rival, mysteriously passed away. So, Carmina’s character is shaping up as one of the series’ more complex and controversial characters.

Unfortunately, Carmina isn’t up to the role’s more complicated demands, and ends up looking just surly and dyspeptic. As for Carmina’s “daring” scenes, actors can’t really bare and dare on “GP” TV, so their “heat” is more nominal and theoretical than actual.

For her part, series lead Maja Salvador, who plays a sexy dancer cum Jane-of-all-trades, gets to sizzle more authentically—but, she’s compromised by the weird way that the show’s plotting has been unreeling of late:

Paulo wants to “get” her at all costs for a valued business partner, so he shafts all of her other moneymaking efforts in order for her to be fully dependent on him.

In addition, male lead Jericho Rosales is now working in the Middle East, where he’s involved in multiple crises and conflicts—and is desired by his lady boss (Antoinette Taus), so Maja ends up feeling jinxed and junked—making it easier for Paulo to finally get what he wants!

We’re all for “complicating” plot twists, but these developments end up weakening Jericho’s once-sterling character, so we don’t know how he (and Maja) can recover after the radical and confounding shift!