By Tim Long

Biggest story from this year's Oscars? To me, it's no contest: once again, the Academy failed to honor Philip Michael Thomas, the actor who played Detective Rico Tubbs on the 80s TV show Miami Vice.

At the height of that show's success, Thomas took to wearing a gold medallion emblazoned with the letters "EGOT," which stood for "Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony." As Thomas told an interviewer in 1984, "Hopefully in the next five years I will win all of those awards."

As of February 2008, Thomas has won none of those awards. He's never even been nominated for any of them. (To be fair, he did win a People's Choice Award, and was also nominated for two Golden Globes.) In fact, only nine people in history have ever won all four—among them, Mike Nichols, Audrey Hepburn, Rita Moreno, and Marvin Hamlisch—and to my knowledge, none of them has ever trumpeted the achievement through gold jewelry.

Of course, it's easy—really easy—to make fun of someone who wears a necklace announcing the awards he plans to win. But I must admit that my feelings about Philip Michael Thomas and his EGOT dreams are a little more complicated.I first read about Thomas and his grandiose ambitions in the mid-80s, when I was shy, overweight kid growing up in small-town Canada. Canadians, especially of the small-town variety, tend to suffer acutely from what the Australians call the "Tall Poppy Syndrome": a vigilant distrust of anyone who aspires to stand above the crowd. I hence made sure to tell no one—not even my family—that I harbored outsized goals of my own: to move to the United States, to live in a big city, and to earn a living as a TV comedy writer.

But there's something sad, and ultimately soul-destroying, about silencing your dreams. So maybe that's why I became a secret teenage devoté of Philip Michael Thomas, and eagerly sought out articles about him in my mother's copies of People and Us. PMT wasn't shy about his goals; he wasn't shy about anything. In one profile, he compared himself to Gandhi; in another, he claimed that women came up to him and said, "Oh God, I love your thighs, I want you to take me to bed with you!" He bragged about his friends ("Steven Spielberg calls … I get calls from Nancy Reagan … The Queen of England wants me to come over") and even about boasted about the breadth of his reading ("I read books on philosophy, religion, higher learning, and spaceships").

Even as a kid, I knew Thomas was an absurd egomaniac. But I also found his lack of pretense incredibly refreshing. Thanks to him, a very small part of me wanted to throw off all that suffocating Canadian modesty, and strut down Main Street wearing a gold necklace reading "WRITER"—or even just "BIG CITY RESIDENT." It sounds crazy, but sometimes I think Philip Michael Thomas helped me overcome just enough of my native diffidence to become what I am today: a not-unsuccessful writer-producer living in Los Angeles. (Of course, I'm no happier now than I was as a fat Canadian teen, but that's a subject for another day.)

I hoped to discuss all of this with Philip Michael Thomas, but sadly he declined my request for an interview. He did, however, pass along the following EGOT-inspired message through his manager: "I wish Tim Long much ENERGY, GROWTH, OPPORTUNITY and TALENT in all his creative endeavors." And I wish Mike Nichols would loan his awards to Philip Michael Thomas, if only for a weekend. I think he'd really appreciate it.

Here's a wonderfully loopy music video Philip Michael Thomas produced in 1985. It's entitled, appropriately enough, "Just the Way I Planned It":

Tim Long is a writer and executive producer forThe Simpsons*, a popular cartoon show.*