Why I Love These Things and Why These Things Don’t Matter | Monday Middlings
I have a fervent relationship with award shows and its spectacular counterparts. Wondering why the masterpiece “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted” wasn’t nominated for an award at the 85th Academy Awards or who the robots that picked up Album of the Year at the 56th Grammy Awards are some of my earliest and confusing memories of pop culture. Massive turning points include Tyler, the Creator’s flaming performance of EARFQUAKE/NEW MAGIC WAND at the 62nd Grammys which triggered an interest in everything weird and wonky music and media could be.
Alongside creations of hubris like the Super Bowl and the Sphere, award shows demonstrate an ideological mastery of pageantry only found in America. No other nation on earth has simply nailed the idea of stuffing generations of prestige and wealth and accomplishment into one room and rewarding them with further prestige, wealth, and accomplishment. The BAFTAs are cool and I guess Eurovision tries every year, but when was the last time you gave a shit about who won the BAFTA for Best Film? Probably whenever you were discussing it as a litmus test for the American Academy Awards, the high mark of institutional glory in the film industry for no other reason than we’ve deluded ourselves so.
And it is delusion — any casual participant of mass culture understands the Academy don’t TRULY award the best in show. Past the dozens of legendary filmmakers who haven’t gripped a statue yet, films from Japan, India, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and more — nations with previously acclaimed and contemporary award-worthy cinematic outputs — are given fractions of the attention America’s film houses receive for objectively comparable output.
Yet every year, we allow these folks to take the stage and crow the grandiosity of their accomplishments, many of which have already been adorned with hundreds of millions at the box office. We cheer for the picks we love, jeer the ones we hate, and generate insurmountable, insufferable discourses about minutiae no human person should genuinely dedicate time, life, and breath to.
It is one of the greatest joys of modern humanity to have these institution clown shows to annually coalesce around though. To have one collective punching bag to admonish or trophy lift to celebrate is a pleasure of modern culture, and American culture, that makes our sporting events, elections, and courthouses so uniquely entertaining and horrifying.
In these delusions of grandeur, however, is where we begin to tow the line of how much they actually matter. As thinly veiled references to Palestinian genocide and overt worships of Ukraine flew last night, and discourse jumps from the woodwork about the merits of red pins versus flag pins and conspiracies form around Killers of the Flower Moon’s complete shutout because of its potential for unruliness in a ceremony as such, it is necessary to take steps back and interrogate the purpose of this discourse and its outcomes.
To be clear, they matter. As much as we’d like to claw around the collective consideration of art as more important than institutional remembrance and the hundreds of missteps they’ve taken over time as evidence of its deserved discreditation or the plethora of discriminatory moments that form the spine of these events, we still return to the Oscars, whether in scathe or celebration and provide it the accreditation many so desperately want it to lose.
The revolution will not be televised and it certainly will not be sandwiched between an awful Jimmy Kimmel one-liner and a nude John Cena bit. The revolution will not be televised and it will not come from the difference of a tiny red pin and a Palestinian pin.
The revolution will not be televised and if it is, it certainly will not be spearheaded by an event that is gold to an abhorrent and comical level meant to award some of the most over-awarded talents on the planet.
And once again, of course these things matter. Jonathan Glazer’s speech, in parallel with his myopic and systemic depiction of the world’s worst modern atrocity, will send waves through the world as his film already has. It is important for Native peoples to begin receiving institutionalized and reparative success and it is important for major institutions to begin rearing their course on decrepit ideologies, even if it takes the effort an ocean-liner veering west.
It is easy to point to make a checklist of every Best Picture nominated director and see whether they’ve made mention of ceasefire in an interview, but it is much harder to question the intent and effect such statements will and are meant to have. To interrogate the expectations of our heroes is to find disappointment in the veil they’ve adorned and we’ve fallen in love with, but in times when humanity has been attached to carefully curated 30 second snippets of our favorite people and morality has been attached to conclusions extrapolated from individual sentences, the thick critical lenses we put on may not even be worth the effort.
“I wouldn’t want to live in that world, but it was fun to walk around on the moon for a day,” said Elliott Smith, following his 1998 performance of “Miss Misery” at the 70th Academy Awards.
That world is exactly it — unless you are reading this as a member of the Academy or an Oscar winning director, that is exactly the dissonance that much be established when broaching these events. We are not a part of that world, and while that world certainly has influence and affect over this world — massively so — that world is their own and there is no reason to treat is as anything but that.
So I will keep watching tiny golden statues handed out every year and I will clap for the ones I love and jeer for the ones I hate but I will continue to view it as a world foreign to my own lest I fall into the belief that somehow that world has anything to do with me.
