Our mission at SAW is to foster conversations about this thing we all love (or love to hate): film/TV. Many of our features are designed with you in mind. Your opinions, to be more to the point. You have ’em. We want to hear ’em.
Question of the Day (QOTD) is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a film/TV-related question that we put to you, the reader. The comments section below is like the feedback box at work; except, in this example, we actually read what you write and care about what you have to say.
I haven’t watched an awards show in years. We used to host friends for the Oscars, do a barbecue or shrimp boil, and keep score cards to see whose predictions for the night were closest to the mark, but that tapered off and we eventually stopped doing it altogether – though not for any specific reason.
These days, it seems fewer and fewer people are checking in to watch the people responsible for creating our popular culture receive awards for their work – and the ratings are the proof in the pudding.
Sunday night’s Golden Globes awards were no exception, with viewership dropping 2% from last year (not huge, but still a drop). And if online chatter is any barometer, the Only real takeaway from that show had almost nothing to do with the work of the people being celebrated and nearly everything to do with host Ricky Gervais’s scathing opening monologue in which he Implied the attendees were a bunch of hypocrites.
So here it is, the Question of the Day: Have entertainment awards shows reached their expiration date? Are the Oscars, the Emmys, and the Golden Globes pointless? Should they do us all a favor and go away or do these types of shows still hold some value for you as a tv and film fan?
As I said above, I haven’t watched any of the major awards shows in years, and I can’t exactly say why. The speeches are tiresome. Especially now when contemporary politics are seemingly inescapable. But, like I said above, I had already lost interest before that became the norm.
So do I think awards shows are pointless and should be retired? Maybe? There’s such a wealth of options for visual entertainment these days that I think the mainstream awards shows can sometimes come across as myopic and a little out of touch – with both the tastes of general audiences and cinephiles.
Now, more than ever, people are able to express and share their opinions on subjects like film and tv with hundreds and sometimes thousands of people in an instant. If we want opinions on movies, we can log onto Twitter or Letterboxd and find people whose tastes more closely align with our own than do professional critics or the people who make up the Academy or Hollywood Foreign Press.
Where does that leave me? Well, I don’t know whether I’d pronounce a death sentence on awards shows if I had the authority, but I do know this: I’m not watching them.
So what about you folks? Are awards shows dead? Pointless?
Tell us why or why not in the comments and we’ll see you there.
