Anghus Houvouras with the five reasons why movie awards don’t matter….
Award season is almost upon us. That sad time of year when art is reduced to political style jockeying where intelligent people abandon dignity and self respect to indulge a desperate need for validation. Studios spend an ungodly sum trying to get their films every major award possible in an annual epic pissing contest. The truth is, awards don’t matter. Not even a little. And here’s why…
1. They’re embarrassing…
The lengths to which some people will go to for an award is ridiculous. For Your Consideration ads have become a window into the souls of those desperate for validation from their peers. You can easily cite some of the most embarrassing, cringe inducing example. Melissa Leo’s personal campaign for Best Supporting Actress in The Fighter is legendarily laughable. Or perhaps you would like to marvel at the fact that someone spent money on a campaign for Twilight. I can’t imagine how anyone even completed typesetting the words ‘Best Actress Kristen Stewart’ without dying from hysterical laughter. And yet, there it is. The sadness isn’t only reserved for the mediocre.
Last year, Steven Spielberg lobbied Bill Clinton to introduce Lincoln at the Golden Globes trying to get the film better positioned with liberal minded Hollywood voters for the heated Best Picture race. Apparently he really wanted Lincoln to win. You would think Steven Spielberg, a filmmaker who has been showered with every major award on the planet, would have evolved past the need to be recognized by his peers. When you start to look at the insane amount of effort being exerted for these awards, even by the most decorated and revered talents in the industry, it begins to feel sad and desperate. How many awards does Spielberg need? I would think if anyone would be content with their level of success, it would be ‘The Beard’, and yet he still engages in shameless hucksterism.
This level of desperation is not something anyone should aspire to.
2. The Best Films rarely win…
Was Titanic really the best film of 1997? That’s the year I often revert to when discussing how pointless award season is. There were so many better films released that year, but Titanic was James Cameron’s big bet. At the time, the most expensive movie ever made, predicted by some to be a bomb of epic proportions. The movie wowed audiences with it’s spectacle and Hollywood rewarded him the year’s highest honor. But let’s be real honest here: Titanic wasn’t close to the best film released in 1997. Let’s be real honest here, Titanic wasn’t even the fifth best film in the category.
Good Will Hunting, L.A. Confidential, The Full Monty, and As Good as It Gets are all better movies. Sure, Titanic was a technical marvel, and impressive in its construction, but was it really the best movie of 1997? Cut to just over twenty years later, when Cameron’s next mega huge pop culture confection Avatar is cleaning up at the box office and somehow gets a nomination for Best Picture.
Take a moment. Let that statement wash over you.
Avatar was nominated for Best Picture. The movie with the terrible acting and the blue cat people that stole plot points from a half dozen other movies was picked as one of the best pictures of the year. If you believe some industry insiders, it was less than a hundred votes away from winning. Can you even imagine a world where Avatar is named as the Best Picture of the year? That’s not a world I want to live in, and a shining example of why awards don’t matter.
Much like Avatar, Titanic was a pop culture tour de force, and it won because of its popularity. Which leads me to point number three.
3. It’s a popularity contest…
If you want to address the worthlessness of award season, look no further than the Independent Spirit Awards which are about as independent as my ass from the rest of my body. The vast majority of the nominees are well known actors in smaller films and movies with a recognizable cast of actors aspiring to do more relevant work. The Indie Spirit awards has become just another red carpet event to feature famous people working for scale. These aren’t really independent films. The intellectually honest label would be ‘The Low Budget Film Awards for movies featuring Famous People’. Much like the Sundance film festival, the Spirit Awards have become overrun with movies that barely qualify as independent and a magnet for A-List talent.
To even be nominated for any major film award, you have to already be famous. Sure, every year you get a throwaway nomination for an up-and-comer (The girl from Beasts of the Southern Wild) or perhaps a foreign actor who has done something of value (Roberto Benigni, Jean Dujardin), but for the most part a requirement of being named ‘the Best’ in any category requires you to be a famous person, or at least a known quantity.
4. The ceremonies are brutal…
Even the best awards’ ceremony is a slog. A chore of epic proportions. Three plus hour monstrosities that seem destined to fail, bereft of personality, and most of the time hosted by a celebrity with the most charisma who will take the path of least resistance and generate the fewest complaints. There are, of course, exceptions. The Golden Globes brought in Ricky Gervais for a few years to try and bring a roast-like mentality to the proceedings, and the Oscars brought in Seth MacFarlane to try and appear relevant. These are the exceptions, as the rule usually involves bringing in the most milquetoast, inoffensive host you can find to placate the masses and make sure not to irritate anyone from the standards and practices department while putting the audience through an annual endurance test and megalomaniacal acceptance speeches.
5. They No longer hold any value…
The idea behind awarding films, filmmakers, and the artists associated with it no doubt started as an earnest endeavor. Taking the time to celebrate these accomplishments was at one point a dignified affair. Not anymore. The idea of the Award Ceremony was adopted, packaged, and franchised to ridiculous lengths. At one point it was the Oscars, the Emmys, and the Grammys. Ceremonies that celebrated Movies, Television, and Music. Now there’s a thousand award shows celebrating the most pedestrian of accomplishments. It seemingly happened in the 1970’s when a coke fueled Dick Clark decided that every event in Hollywood required a camera crew and a distribution deal with the major network.
Everyone has an award show now. January is riddle with award show garbage: The Globes, The SAG awards, Indie Spirit, all the various Guild ceremonies, Critic Awards. There are award shows for athletes (the ESPYs), Teen Choice Awards, People’s Choice Awards, and for some reason three distinct awards shows for Country Music. How the hell did that happen?
Well, if you roll out a red carpet and line up photographers, celebrities will apparently show up. Slap some gold or brass onto a piece of mahogany and wait for people to show up. You could argue that the Oscars still hold some value. Why on earth would people spend millions of dollars campaigning for that statue if it was still worthless? However, the other awards feel like they have the poignancy of a cereal box toy and yet Harvey Weinstein would probably still spend eight million dollars to acquire one.
Movie awards might have one point been relevant, but in this day and age they feel antiquated and rather pointless.
Anghus Houvouras is a North Carolina based writer and filmmaker. His latest work, the novel My Career Suicide Note, is available from Amazon.
Originally published January 12, 2014. Updated April 11, 2018.
