You didn’t think we were just going to hand out a slough of awards this week and let this baby fall through the cracks, did ya?

And so we humbly offer Vivid’s Steve Hirsch The George C. Scott Memorial Hardcore Award. To understand the significance of this gesture, you’d have to have seen the film, “Hardcore” which came out in 1979. Though it is available on DVD. In it, Scott plays a Midwestern man of firm religious principles whose daughter has been swept into the seedy underbelly of the Los Angeles porn industry and has become the female lead in a bunch of stag films. Boy, does this sound familiar.

Scott hires a private detective [Peter Boyle] to find her, but the PI instead of taking the mission just as seriously is sadistically amused by Scott’s torment as he’s confronted with the evidence. [Bearing in mind, Scott didn’t have the Internet rubbing his face in it.] And so Scott takes matters in hand.

Topically, you might look into the soul of present day circumstances involving Montana Fishburne and wonder if her father’s dealing with the same kind of pain as Scott’s. It’s almost rhetorical to ask. Of course he is. But the smut peddlers, as they do in the film, care little and find such emotional matters inconvenient to their own needs of making a fast buck. Similarly, weren’t the reports this week that Fishburne’s “people” offered major money to buy Montana’s movie but were told it was too late? Then, again, could have been a bullshit story.

Of course there’ll be more stupid, naive and economically challenged women swept into the morass of the forbidden, the sex tapes and the lure of filthy lucre, of that you can be sure; so let the Fishburne story stand as a possible template for the future with one subtle advisory.

The film, similar in feel to The Taxi Driver, and ugly as it is in topic, turns even uglier. Yeah, the porn guys get it, get it good, and the denouement is a blood bath. Remember, it all ends badly.

So it’s with those chilling thoughts that we suggest that anyone walking into the Vivid offices with a shotgun nowadays – as Scott would have done in the movie – might not be there looking for clay pigeons.

[Talent agents, not just porn producers, might be well advised to double lock their doors as well.]

Because life, predictably, imitates art all the time. It’s just a matter of time until it does. Let’s just hope it doesn’t in this case or future ones.

Even if, TMZ.com will be there to chronicle the event for its enormous traffic potential. Count on it.