This weekend you might opt to stay up late and take in that marathon of expensive gúnaí, spray tan and buttock-clenching sincerity that is the Oscar awards ceremony. You may be keen to know who wins best picture or best make-up and hairstyling. Or you may be more interested in who is going to lose.
The Oscars, and the other televised awards ceremonies that aspire towards the glitzy, all do variants on the same thing: they show the faces of the shortlisted candidates, all of them trying to project just-happy-to-be-nominated energy through their not-too-big smiles and carefully choreographed body language.
It makes the announcement of the winner cruelly pleasurable. Because it’s not about the reaction of the new champion – that’s predictable – but how the losers deal with it. Television coverage of awards ceremonies is the visual embodiment of Gore Vidal’s line about how it’s not enough to succeed, others must fail. And those who fail must grin and feign delight as convincingly as possible: as if they didn’t really want to win the award for themselves at all. In the following minutes or even hours, they must be aware of the constantly hunting television cameras, ready to expose even a flicker of disappointment.
The losers can never let on how much preparation they have invested into this day: selecting what to wear, arranging who is going to polish and brush and trim them. Writing and practising their acceptance speech so it sounds spontaneous. And all for nothing.
People have a deep human yearning for validation and applause. We love awards
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It must be torture; particularly as they listen to the speech from the winner who will humbly imply that they scarcely deserve the award at all: there are so many others who helped them and must be thanked. And anyway, what’s most important, what’s the greatest honour, is telling these stories. It’s about doing the work.
Pity about them, you might say. These are privileged, wealthy people. Going to awards ceremonies is part of the deal. It keeps the profile up. And even getting nominated for prizes has professional benefits. Yet it might also lead you to infer that the fame, the money, the fans and the chance to do interesting work to the best of their ability isn’t enough for them. There have to be awards as well.
Yes, actors can be shallow and self-serving. Spoiler alert: so can the rest of us. Here’s one overlooked aspect of life in modern Ireland: you’d be hard-pressed to find a job or a pastime or an issue you might be interested in where there isn’t also the possibility of winning an award. There are the Irish Pension Awards. Awards for HR, for weddings, for Irish people who live abroad. For plumbing.
No one books a boiler service based on whether the plumber is award-winning. No one chooses a pension scheme on that basis either
Unlike actors, it is more difficult to divine any obvious professional benefit to winning one of these. No one books a boiler service based on whether the plumber is award-winning. No one chooses a pension scheme on that basis either. The benefits, if they do exist, seem to be more internal: to earn kudos within a particular industry or company.
But perhaps most significant is the deep human yearning for validation and applause. People love winning awards. It’s why hotels and conference centres are constantly booked out to host them. It’s also why Ireland doesn’t have a national comedy awards event. The comedians are far too busy hosting all the other ones.
I’m not being sniffy here. I recall being at my first radio awards where myself and a former colleague bonded over our disdain for the frippery of the occasion. Awards, we agreed, are meaningless. We’re not here for that. We’re here to do good work.
We both won. Hours later, I saw my colleague dancing on a table, while I, in a haze of victory and sweet sherry, left mine behind on top of a cigarette machine. But I went back in the next day and got it.
