Here come the Oscars. Even people who rarely visit the cinema can’t resist the world’s greatest awards ceremony. The collision of extremities makes it compulsive viewing. It’s a sort of morality play where the seven deadly sins, and their contrary virtues, are paraded in dumbshow. Greed, hope, vanity, despair, jubilation, pride, joy, envy and a dozen other maxed-out sentiments are let loose. Moderation is banned. Temperance, decency and any restraining impulse must take the night off so that excess and all its spiritual allies can frolic and cavort. We know what will happen. The winners, clutching the pepper pot-sized statue, will sob their gratitude to the world and claim that the gilded midget means more to them than all the money they will ever earn. Chances are, they’ll be telling the truth. The ceremony has one perfectly sincere objective. It brings kudos and publicity to the winners.
Creative people are peculiarly susceptible to the lure of prizes. The arts, unlike the law, medicine or academia, for example, have very few barriers to entry. Artists must struggle through their careers without the splendid official garb and honorific titles that magnify the egos of barristers, doctors and university dons. Awards ceremonies fill that deficit. They give artists something they crave, a visual denominator of status. It may be just a twist of worked copper or a laminated something-or-other but to the artist a prize is enormously significant. It’s a fact. That’s what matters. You can see it, you can touch it. So can other people. When you take it home you can pretend it means nothing to you by placing it in the downstairs loo (the one room that even a casual guest is likely to visit and thus accidentally glimpse the evidence of your achievement and of your ‘reluctance’ to display it publicly).
The lust for arts prizes has led to a Malthusian explosion in their numbers. You can’t open a newspaper these days without seeing some Moët-soaked luvvie tumbling out of a swanky hotel clutching a statuette stamped with the logo of a faceless corporation. Not all prizes are bad, of course. The older and more venerable ones fulfil the task of honouring achievement. Here’s a good test. Can you hear the word ‘prize’ or ‘award’ after the name? Man–Booker, Bafta, Turner, Olivier, Ivor Novello. These are worth retaining. Ideally, each sphere of the arts should restrict itself to one ceremony a year. A multiplicity of awards cheapens the currency and creates a world where all artists are ‘award-winning’ unless they happen to be ‘multi-award-winning’.
More prizes are bound to mean more unworthy winners. According to insiders, the process of selection is invariably corrupt. Prizes given by panels reward the choice of the bolshiest panellist. Prizes given by popular ballot reward the nominee who votes most energetically for himself.
The glut of upstart awards is putting enormous pressure on the established prizes. The Man–Booker feels it has to fight off competition from wannabe rivals by keeping up a constant barrage of announcements and photo-opportunities. Nearly a year before the prize is awarded, the judges are revealed to an awestruck public. Then comes the longlist. Then the shortlist. Then readings from the shortlist. Finally, after a ten-month preamble, the envelope is opened and the winner is dispatched on a national tour which subtly promotes the brand further.
But instead of killing off the competition these tactics have taught Man–Booker’s rivals how to harvest quick headlines for themselves. Now every book prize has a longlist, a shortlist, a panel of celebrity judges, a televised bash with trumpeters in tunics, a town crier wearing medals and a hat like Napoleon, and so on. The monster multiplies. It creates a bad impression. The more awards we have the more artists will be seen as a bunch of self-important lightweights who are interested only in ephemeral publicity, free champagne and the acclaim of other people who are interested only in ephemeral publicity and free champagne. Heaven forbid that that libel should gain credence.
My trade union, the critics’ circle, has an annual prize-giving ceremony which I dutifully ignore in the interests of discouraging spurious awards. We critics deliver accolades every time we file our copy. We don’t need to doughnut up around a foghorn once a year and harass the public with yet more opinions. My guess is that most awards ceremonies don’t seek to offer publicity and prestige to the recipients but to generate publicity and prestige for the sponsor.
Some are just lobby groups. The Orange Prize for fiction proudly waves the flag for segregation. It’s the KKK with lipstick. By excluding men, the prize fosters the myth that womenfolk are an endangered minority clinging on for survival against unstoppable armies of male authors. The opposite is the case. Women write, edit, publish, read and buy fiction in far greater numbers than men.
Then there are the Wiftas. This annual bash promotes ‘women in film and television’. The sexism charge is less valid here as the film industry is dominated by men. But the very existence of the Wiftas, 19 years after their inauguration, suggests that they haven’t been terribly nifty at promoting their protégées. At the Wiftas last December Helen Mirren won the ominous ‘lifetime achievement award’. (Translation: ‘Come and do two minutes stand-up at our party before the Alzheimer’s kicks in.’) Other prizes included the Panalux Craft Award (won by Dina), the Skillset Creative Originality Award (won by Margy), and the Eon Productions Business Award (won by Becky and Karen.) Well done, ladies. Doubtless they were delighted with their gongs but the real victors were the corporate sponsors, who convinced Dame Helen to show up and thus guaranteed themselves a whopping dose of media coverage for the price of a few newspaper ads.
In this swamp of exploitation and vanity, a lone figure stands out. Last January Melvyn Bragg and his South Bank Show Awards opened up the tent-flap and bravely wandered off into the blizzards of oblivion. True, this act of self-sacrifice wasn’t entirely voluntary. And the fact that Bragg gave the final lifetime achievement award to himself took some of the polish off his martyrdom. But it’s a start. Those who sponsor arts prizes always insist they care passionately about the arts. If they really cared they would do the decent thing. Sound the gong one last time and disappear.
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