Well, that’s kind of how opinions work.
Not really, as I don’t advertise these facts about myself (this is an anonymous board… I don’t go around talking about these things with people IRL, other than a few very close friends). Awards are, by their very nature, about advertising stuff. If you want to say, however, that any statement about oneself, any opinion one holds, any value one espouses is an “award,” then I would say that that is a distortion of the meaning of the word “award.”
. But that’s kind of how personal attributes work, right? People like and want to associate with other people based on something…
Sure. If it were just a list that smart people put up in order to guide others, I have no issue with that. It’s all the politics and money attached to the awards that make it something that is overblown, ugly, and distasteful. That said, I have not found Oscars or Golden Globes or anything like that useful in my search for movies that work for me.
I remember some spam ad was telling me some person was voted “Best Boobs in the Industry”. I don’t believe that, mainly because if there was a vote on that I would have been part of it.
Wow. You’re old.
And long-winded.
But mostly old.
Median age of TV viewership in this country is “Could have watched The Brady Bunch first-run”, which is why there are so many “nostalgia” TV networks now that we have digital subchannels.
It’s also why TVs, as such, don’t even exist anymore: We have display panels with HDMI ports which may also include a coaxial input and an ATSC tuner. They might also include a computer with WiFi and a Roku subscription, for people who aren’t old.
That came on at one of the screens of a sports bar I was at the other night. I was curious enough to look up what it was on my phone, then went back to drinking.
I haven’t watched an award show in ages, and when I did, it was the Oscars. Back in the day I had always seen at least one of the movies up for best picture beforehand, so I had some investment in it, some frame of comparison, to get to the end, and that just hasn’t been the case for gosh, several years. Probably after the Noland Batman films?
And that’s not because I don’t watch a lot movies anymore. I go out to the movies a couple times a month on average.
Well, you did do so here (including the specific timeframe of your TV abstinence certainly wasn’t absolutely necessary information, but went in its intent beyond the mere setting of context), and this is a place you socialize—no matter the name you use, it’s the personality you broadcast that counts.
No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying that any opinion, value, behavior you broadcast for the explicit purpose of signaling that you hold the right opinions and values, and follow the right behaviors to fit in with a certain social peer group constitute ‘awards’ in this sense.
Well, yes. And people want to watch movies, read books, listen to music ‘based on something’. In both cases, it’s impractical to impossible to perform the necessary vetting oneself, so one uses proxies—other people’s recommendations (a friend of a friend is likely to share enough common ground with me that they might be a suitable friend for me, too), or public displays, such as awards shows.
But why should they cater only to smart people? There are lots of people who aren’t very smart, as I’m sure you’re aware, and they wouldn’t be entertained by the choices of such a panel. The key is to find the relevant group whose judgments you can trust; if that’s not the Academy or the Nobel committee, maybe there’s some suitably discerning organization whose choices are more in line with your tastes—although of course, it might be that your tastes are so singularly rarefied that none exists, in which case, I would submit you put these tastes to the greater benefit of humanity and broadcast your judgments for the edification of those lacking your sophistication.
But then, your target isn’t awards as such, but their commercialization. But well, anything popular is going to be exploited for money—hitting a ball with a stick is good fun, but once it gets thrown into the mill of monetization, it becomes an ugly spectacle where people get paid millions for the sole distinction of being able to hit a ball with a stick a little bit better than others, as if that were of any value in itself. That’s not a failure of the sport itself, but rather, of the exploitation due to its popularity.
So your question shouldn’t be ‘Who gives a fuck* about honors and awards?’ (as evidently, enough people do to make their exploitation commercially viable), but rather, ‘Why do we fuck up everything popular by adding a crass commercialization machinery?’.
*Best guess inference to the intent of [blank].
It’s quite the crime I hear.
I gave the date to indicate, for what it was worth, what TV content I might be more familiar with. Lord knows I watched a ton of bad 70s and 80s TV that a kid might have watched back then…
I don’t know if “socialize” is the right word for what I do here. The Dope is a place I go to to look for answers or get specific types of opinions. I don’t really have friends here [invites pile-on of, "You loser–of course you don’t have friends! Here or anywhere!].
I don’t know if that makes for much of a sociological observation. You could kinda pick apart anything anyone says or does on that basis. I mean, you’re not wrong. I dress rather plainly; one couldn’t tell my politics from my clothes. But I dyed my hair teal a couple years back, and one reason I loved it is that it did, as you say, signal that I was with the hippies and Liberals (and not the square conservatives) because conservatives don’t, for the most part, dye their hair like that. So I do “signal” to some extent, but I actually don’t try to give myself much in the way of “awards.” You know, overly virtue-signal or boast. I’m actually not a cultural snob for the most part but I am sick of the stuff we’re about to talk about below. That’s why I don’t watch TV. I can’t stand the commercials. I consume plenty of content online, etc.
It’s not all that impossible. I’ve done lots of hunting for music in bargain bins, antique stores, etc. I’ve bought DVDs for cheap that looked good. Your point is taken, however. Award shows could, in theory, be a great way to find stuff. I have not found that to be the case, however.
Well, smart and/or caring about the thing in question. You mentioned cinematography. Now that I think about it, I can’t recall ever seeing, for example, “Top 50 Albums for Stupid People.”
When it comes to movies, like a lot of people I look at Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, and I have some favorite reviewers on YouTube.
Awards are commercialization. That’s the problem. And they are the type of commercialization that sets up incentive systems that produce results I don’t like. I mean both the winners of the awards (though I do not say that the Oscars universally produce winners I find bad) but just the self-aggrandizing nature of the shows themselves. The Oscars exist first and foremost to promote the Oscars. Joe/Jane Blow’s “Best Movies of 2018” video on YouTube most likely exists because that person loves movies and wants to talk about them without much hope of monetary reward.
Viewership of the Oscars has been tanking for awhile now. Instead of pointing at “crass commercialization” in the Venn diagram, I would point at the circle that surrounds it: “bad incentive systems.”
Well, yeah, true, some Awards have become all about the Award Show itself. There is a reason there is such a phrase as “Oscar bait” and there is a bunch of those released at strategic points in the year. Some awards also suffer from being essentially just a platform for a particular segment of the criticsphere in the particular genre or activity. The important part about it is to be conscious that mostly, the awards are intra-industry bragging rights, showing how much of an influencer either the awardee or, more often, the awarder, is inside that specific circle. So the Oscars are all about the Academy and the Baseball HoF is about the Writers Association. We must take that into account and not confuse that endorsement with some sign that this is something each of us must like.
Kennedy Center Honors at least are usually career recognitions, rather than “best of the year” so you can say OK this is awarding a body of work.
In the end the best awards would be those based on recognition from peers and from those who study your field (myself I have a modest one of those, purely organizational, and I was very pleased for it to be so). OTOH I see too damn many people around me seeking to get “awards” and “recognitions”, just so they can get a Legislator or Congressperson to mention their name into the Record, and getting them from organizations that *themselves *are looking to give awards to “influencers” in order to bask in the reflection.
BTW looking at it in hindsight, Dylan ***not ***showing up for his Lit Nobel was a wise move, because surely the whole thing would have become an Access Hollywood special about him, and already the science winners get treated like afterthoughts in the popular press, no need to completely overshadow them at the actual event.
Frankly the fact that both The Artist and Birdman won Best Picture at the Oscars just re-affirms my belief how shallow and self-indulgent they actually are. It’s the movie industry congratulating themselves for making a movie about themselves. That’s such a magnanimous accomplishment.