Joaquin Phoenix at the Oscars. The transformation of Oscars stage to pulpit is complete. Credit : Richard Harbaugh / Getty Images
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Awards ceremonies are agonising. You sit there, lumped together with strangers with whom, thankfully, a trench friendship soon develops. There is occasionally a kind of a meal, sometimes an amusingly branded chocolate that provides whole seconds of fun, but more often than not no food at all and an endless supply of alcohol. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if the whole business didn’t drag on for hours and hours and hours. You soon tire of spotting notables — “is that or isn’t that his missus from Midsomer Murders?” — across the room.
The self-aggrandising, faux-naïf speeches drag. The host starts to make cracks of the “chin up, we’re almost halfway through” variety. Throughout this process there’s always the outside chance that you might have won something. And then you lose, and a dash of sour grapes is added to the cocktail of physical fatigue, existential ennui, and mild drunkenness.
Why was I there? Why did people tune in? What is the function of prizes? These ceremonies are one of those cultural rituals that we just accept, and everybody goes along with. They’ve always been there and they always will be there, so nobody pays them much conceptual thinking, like herpes or Ken Barlow. But, recently, they’ve turned from an obvious lot of industry puff and guff that didn’t do much harm in the universal schema, into supposedly significant grandstands of the culture war battles, adding an exciting new stratum of nonsense.
These prizes are often old, sometimes very, very old. The first Oscars ceremony took place in 1929, the first BAFTA was handed out in 1949, the first Booker in 1969. The Brit Awards came along in 1977. Most are decided by mysterious secluded juries of the great and the good, though anyone with a BAFTA membership gets to vote in the first round of nominations, which goes some way to explaining why they are often frowned upon, what with their faint whiff of democracy.
Awards voted by the public are disparaged and discouraged, because they show up the gap between what people actually like and want, and what they should like or want. Public votes such as the National Television Awards are about the mass market; stasis, habit, continuity — witness the endless wins for Ant & Dec. The twitter snob reaction to Mrs Brown’s Boys winning Best Comedy at the NTAs was very telling. Art as a thing that tickles or soothes you rather than makes a great statement is regarded as hopelessly improper.
The most obvious purpose of awards is to show the reverse of public opinion, to act as a showy, physical embodiment of the even longer established magazine round-ups or newspaper critics’ lists. A prize is not just the object or the prize money itself. It can keep a cultural product alive, give it a second lift. It enhances the career prospects of the winner. These are all reasonable enough things.
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SubscribeA brilliant piece.