Society

Award shows are a farce—and their choices only prove their rising irrelevance

The Golden Globes sparked outrage when they failed to nominate Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You. But the awards industry has always been hopeless at recognising greatness

February 22, 2021
Michaela Coel in I May Destroy You. Photo: LANDMARK MEDIA / Alamy Stock Photo
Michaela Coel in I May Destroy You. Photo: LANDMARK MEDIA / Alamy Stock Photo

In an episode of the beloved sitcom Schitt’s Creek, Alexis Rose asks her mother, the incorrigible luvvie Moira Rose, what her favourite season is, and after considering for a second, Moira replies: “Awards.”

It’s a beautiful joke, but it also captures what is entirely vacuous about this time of year. The whole thing is confected, with all the various awards-giving bodies second-guessing each other and glad-handing the handful of favourites that are designated as favourites early on, on god only knows whose whim. Meanwhile, the Oscar-chasing editorials and photoshoots (with attractive actors, if you please!) garner advertising money for magazines and TV channels; designers court the red carpet publicity; actors seek fresh opportunities; producers boost their films. It’s an industry.

In the midst of this, presumably to the complete indifference of such people as Moira Rose, the evenings—the BAFTAs, Golden Globes, Spirit Awards, Oscars, all of the different critic awards—are supposed to crown the best films and/or TV shows around. If it feels like rewarding high quality work in the industry and glitzy showboating are an uneasy match, it's because they are. Sponsors and advertisers for the Oscars would immediately retire their contributions to the shebang if, one year, the ceremony went rogue and crowned, say, Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela.

On top of this, awards have come to be seen in recent years as a barometer for social progress in the arts—or the lack thereof. Halle Berry, upon winning the first (and so far only) best actress prize given to a black woman, said that “a door tonight has been opened”; the Best Film award given to Moonlight was widely perceived as marking an improvement in a ceremony that has always been glaringly white.

Similar claims were made for Kathryn Bigelow’s win as best director in 2009—still the only woman to win that prize, 12 years later. As a result of various campaigns, or bad publicity (such as the BAFTAs earned when they announced all-white acting nominees last year), many awards have revised their rules and membership in order to boost work from ethnic minorities more effectively and represent the contributions of women.

Into such a contested landscape steps a programme like Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You, which, having been voted programme of the year by everything from Sight & Sound to the Guardian, would have been a heavy favourite for awards. Instead, the show was completely snubbed by the Golden Globes, prompting a wave of justified public outrage. The writer Nikesh Shukla, speaking for many, tweeted: “Every single conversation I've had with people in television over the last 10 or so months has included everyone gushing about, citing, or being influenced by I May Destroy You.” He’s right: the programme was comfortably the zeitgeist show of 2020; it seems inconceivable to leave it out. 

This is where the task of separating institutional racism and misogyny from professional uselessness becomes arduous. Awards ceremonies such as the Golden Globes have almost always been hopeless, and often failed to reward greatness: where are Lisa Kudrow’s Golden Globes for The Comeback, or Kathryn Hahn’s for I Love Dick, or Alia Shawkat’s for Search Party? In truth, in television terms the Globes occasionally get it right, which muddies the waters all the more, because it seems to ascribe undeserved legitimacy to what is mostly a sham: this is a ceremony that has repeatedly nominated Downton Abbey and which famously bunged an award for Best TV Comedy Series to… Mozart in the Jungle.

As with the Oscars managing to reward Moonlight and Parasite, the Globes’ recognition of a programme like Donald Glover’s Atlanta is really only a bandage over a gaping wound. Racism still prevails in the awards: this year the best actress categories, in which Coel deserved a spot, are totally white, for the second year in a row: that’s 40 nominations without an actress of colour. 

It’s right that people should rage about this, because the snub proves that different stories are not being given the time of day, and it once again cuts off opportunities and visibility from performers like Weruche Opia and Paapa Essiedu, Coel’s co-stars. Yet—and this may well be of little consolation to her—Michaela Coel has created a work of art whose impact extends far beyond these absurd little awards.

Her programme has already hit home, sparked countless conversations, reshaped what episodic television can do; a whole generation will remember I May Destroy You as the defining programme of our lockdown year. In a sense, awards ceremonies like the Globes need Coel far more than she, an artist who now feels completely free as a creator and performer, needs them. A parallel could be found in Daniel Kaluuya, who was at least nominated for an Oscar for Get Out—handily the most iconic performance by a male actor of the last few years—but then lost out to Gary Oldman, playing Churchill in a film nobody has ever seen. Everybody knows who the best actor is; it’s the loss of awards ceremonies that they couldn’t see it. 

Again, this must be cold comfort to performers shut out because of institutional racism. But if anybody is losing out this year it’s a racist, retrograde awards industry that grows ever more absurd and fragile, clinging on to celebrity, heavily publicised diversity measures and occasional scraps of legitimacy to paper over its own redundancy.