MOVIE AWARD SEASON - do we really need it?
The film awards season is long overdue, with major players such as the Golden Globe, BAFTA and Berlinale completed. Now it’s Oscar's turn out of the big international awards, a prize-mastodon steeped in tradition from an institution that engages a great many people every year. But do we really need them, these glossy, often superficial prizes, and the associated handouts?
In the course of a calendar year, there are a number of major and minor film festivals, often with associated award ceremonies associated with the respective films. Large and well-known festivals such as Venice, Berlin, Cannes and Oscar are often covered by the media with a focus on celebrities, dresses, glitter and glamour, while the real alibi for gatherings like this is to pay tribute to films. Good films.
To be seen and heard
As in most other industries, the film industry is also about being seen, heard and noticed. This does not mean that you are not also hardworking at the same time, but film awards, festivals and tributes to your own industry can be motivated and organised in different ways. The nominees and winners of the Norwegian film award Amanda are, for example, selected by a newly composed jury each year. The American Golden Globes are decided by foreign journalists who work for foreign media based in the United States.
The Oscars themselves are a so-called industry award, where industry professionals themselves vote on the nominees. In order to be able to vote, one must be a member of the Oscar Academy, a group of around ten thousand members who receive new members every year since some drop out, either because they die, or like Will Smith - are kicked out. The nominations take place within the various industry branches. People who work as directors then nominate and vote for the 'best director' category, actors vote for the 'best actor' categories, sound engineers vote for the 'best sound' nominations, etc. The exception is 'best film', where anyone can nominate and vote for their favourite.
A lot can be said bitterly and sloppily about the necessity of, for example, the Oscars. Due to its great focus on glossy surfaces and celebrities, the 95-year-old film award has been met with a lot of opposition and criticism over the years. The academy has been criticised for a lack of diversity, accusations of corruption, and gender bias, just to name a few. In recent years, many of the biggest film awards have taken such criticism to heart and are, as of today, more diverse than ever. But what about the importance of prices? More specifically, what might winning a high-profile film award entail?
From the industry's side
Although some would argue that the Oscars and similar grand awards ceremonies have less power, influence and is more passé than ever, it still counts a lot to be able to stamp the movie poster, the Instagram post, or the CV with "Winner of Oscar". That something parallel is also wrapped in tulle, glitter and glamour, is strictly speaking not synonymous with either poor quality, frivolous handling, and/or that there is a corrupt system behind it. In the Oscar bubble, it is thus the industry itself that celebrates itself and its own. Being appreciated, of course in any workplace and for things one accomplishes, is in itself an intrinsic value and a good argument for choosing winners among us. It may sound elementary and self-evident, but it obviously has a boost value to be praised by one's own people.
At the same time, involvement within a film award generates recognition, attention, possible new connections and relationships within the industry. This of course happens anyway, regardless of any awards, but then it is perhaps often in the form of more dry, and industry-technical reasons, more than from random meetings between people, creatives and new acquaintances.
God knows how many new ideas, relationships and acquaintances are created through such gatherings. But it is obvious that a lot happens within this bubble. If you are nominated for an award, opportunities open up that you might otherwise never have had. Just ask actress Renate Reinsve after her Cannes-award in 2021 and last year's two Oscar-nominations for World's Worst Person. Or the director couple Espen Sandberg and Joachim Rønning, after the Oscar-nomination for Kon-Tiki (2012). Or what about legend Liv Ullmann? After the Oscar participation, their lives and careers have changed considerably, and forever.
From the audience's point of view
From the audience's point of view, it is perhaps both celebrity, film interest and curiosity combined that draw us towards film award ceremonies. At the same time, attention and awareness of a film can be decisive for whether one gets to know the specific film at all. Often, award winners are small and narrower films that you would otherwise not have become aware of. In the same way, through film festivals, distributors also become aware of industry gossip, films that create buzz and engagement, and the films are bought up and distributed by distributors, to the benefit of a film-interested audience here at home.
This is the public's profit in that we get access to films that we might otherwise never get via the local cinema or streaming service. Many a smaller, narrow and quirky horror film has, for example, been discovered during small film festivals, so as to become the talk of the town there, and then be bought up for distribution outside the world where it then goes on to triumph around the world.
But it's also a fact that people tend to get a little upset that commercially popular films don't always shine with their presence among the nominees. This is a classic dichotomy between the people and the industry - the quality films are often not to be found among the popular favorites either. An award ceremony such as the Oscars can here give the people a clue as to what is really considered a good film, and the following are well worth checking out. Some of the challenges Oscar has had in recent years, including declining viewership, have led the academy to introduce more populist award categories and more commercially popular films. But there is a limit here to how much such a film can be used to win the world's biggest film prize, and the dilemma presents itself - should one satisfy the public, or retain professionalism and quality criteria?
Controversies
Much for this reason, more public-friendly award ceremonies also abound. One of these is the famous Razzie Awards, which traditionally take place every year the night before the Oscars. Here, prizes are awarded to the year's worst films and actors, as a counterpart to the more serious film awards. Somewhat ironically, it is often far from the worst films and actors that are nominated, but primarily well-known names, to attract attention.
Some of the controversies linked to the Oscar race in particular have been in the way one promotes one's films to the Academy members. If you have a lot of money, yes, you can set up lavish campaigns and parties, all to try to influence and get the academy members to see the film in question. But it's one thing to spend as much money as you want, and can, to get industry people to actually see your film. Another is to make them like it. In that case, it is mostly only the film itself that can convince them to vote for it, and therefore over-promotion can also perhaps work in the opposite way, where you become more negative towards the people behind it, and therefore also towards the film itself.
Dazzled by glitz and glamour, right?
Many people may be walking around with attitudes and feelings that an industry award such as the Oscar is probably as thoroughly corrupt as much else in the states. But then at the same time one also believes that thousands of hard-working and serious business people are therefore corrupt, but if so, this has to be at the expense of any conspirators themselves. Unfairness and influence occur in all industries, but that does not mean that it is mostly seriousness, quality and industry pride that dominate by far the strongest, also within the film industry.
People who dislike such shows may have a tendency not to be able to see through all the glitter - they may take it literally, as a picture of the whole industry as somewhat superficial. But it is of course not the case that film stars bask in the glory every day, quite the opposite. Why many people seem to forget how much hard work actually goes behind films, both in front of and behind the camera, is a bit of a mystery to the undersigned. It can therefore be difficult to see the problems with dressing up once or a few times a year to pay tribute to the industry, with honest and admirable votes for the winner and the other nominees.
Discussions about whether the correct winner won occur every year. But still - the nominated films always have qualities about them on several levels and are, if not necessarily always the absolute best from an entire year of films, anyway good enough that they deserve some good-natured praise. So— why howl so loudly that the "wrong" film won or was nominated? Pricing is neither a scientific exercise nor a mathematical formula - it is based on taste, pleasure and quality assessment, often from people who work in the industry themselves.
Symbol of taste, quality and professional strength
One of the best arguments for lifting up award ceremonies is therefore that smaller and quality-heavy films get the light and attention thrown on them that they both deserve, and which makes the public aware of them. This is how you give honor, glory and gilded promotion to quality films, while at the same time big and well-known films, which in any case have a large apparatus behind them and automatically gobble up money, are largely kept away. It is a win-win for several parties.
But whether a film award is governed by the industry itself, outsiders and more neutral journalists, or chosen by the people themselves, it boils down to a common denominator, namely personal taste. And although televised film awards and similar shows have had a declining audience in recent years, in a world where brain-dead reality shows and worse abound in parallel, it will always be possible to argue for many important and positive aspects of film award ceremonies as entertainment. They become a symbol of taste, professional weight and quality, even if it is presented in a glossy package on television.
The cinema's battle to retain its audience is largely about the large commercial actors gobbling up more and more of the space within the cinema programme. In light of this, film festivals and the focus on alternative good films are becoming more important than ever. If you want to make the public aware that there are actually good films out there, and something other than Marvel and Disney, then festivals and award-winning films can be a much-awaited counterpoint to the big blockbusters. It will therefore be a disservice to a film-interested public if you tone down both festivals and awards whose function is to highlight quality over quantity, and the film field will become narrower and poorer than ever if this disappears.
Film dissemination through, and from, the culture itself, reminds us of what is actually out there, where gigantic money-dominating campaigns are not the driving force, but where quality, commitment and love for the art of film comes first. This is exactly what characterizes most types of film award ceremonies. Because it is at the festival, in the intersection between industry professionals' meetings, and the public's desire for discovery, that the magic is found and experienced. Where the innovative and preferably a little more demanding, but also far more captivating and wonderful, is discovered. Without the festival arena and the awards gatherings, the structure in this way of discovering the film medium disappears, and what remains are the money guzzlers, the commercially simple, boring and poor. No one but the producers of such things benefit, least of all us film-loving audiences.
(This article is taken from: https://samtiden.no/film-og-tv-synspunkt/2023/filmprissesongen-trenger-vi-den)