Thrill of a lifetime?

For all its reputation for unpredictability, this much is true about the entertainment business: By the time you turn 50, you will have a minimum of one lifetime achievement award.

If you don't, you should have taken your family's advice and gone to law school.

Once a prestigious honor recognizing decades of pioneering work, the lifetime achievement award has become a cottage industry of gush.

These cliched, hyperbolic honors are now handed out at award shows like so much swag, treats dished out by an industry that loves to love itself.

Obscure film festivals present them to get stars to show up. Fundraisers promote them so people will buy tables. Third-rate events use them to lure stars and filmmakers who can't be called "an artistic genius" too many times.

Leonard DiCaprio got a Lifetime Achievement Award at age 30 from a film festival in Santa Barbara. Clint Eastwood, still at the top of his game, seems to get one every week, as if he's headed for a rest home, including one recently from the Directors Guild of America.

Michael Jackson has at least seven, and probably more. And I'm not counting the "Best Selling Pop Male Artist of the Millennium" tribute, which he received at the end of the last one, leaving in the dust every troubadour in 16th Century Europe.

Shirley MacLaine has a batch of them on her mantle — including the American Comedy Awards, the Denver International Film Festival and, last month, the Palm Springs International Film Festival. If anyone deserves multiple life achievement awards, it's her.

Then there are the Grammys, scheduled for Wednesday at Staples Center. This show gives out lifetime achievement awards by the truckload.

The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences will bestow seven lifetime honors to the living and dead at a special ceremony this year. But all told, the real tally is 13 or 14 people, if you take into account, for instance, that there were three members of the British rock group Cream.

There's something to be said for honoring people sooner than later when they work in a business where the average lifespan is constantly under siege from sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.

But like most award shows, the Grammys started small, then suffered a bad case of swelling kudos.

It began by honoring a single artist, Bing Crosby, with a lifetime achievement award in 1962. For the next few years, the limit was one person. Who could argue with honoring Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald or Elvis Presley?

Then the awards multiplied like rabbits.

Neil Portnow, president of NARAS, defends the lifetime decision-making process as a serious evaluation in which only the best get through a "blue ribbon committee of experts" that filters out the undeserving for trustees.