h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Do awards like the Golden Globes, the Academy Awards and the Emmys really reward excellence or are they just popularity contests?

I think the Academy Awards have a certain dignity - they usually do reward the best films of the year. If they happen to be popular, then that's probably not a coincidence. But it doesn't award all good films of the year - like comedies, which tend to be very popular. Oscar hates comedies...

I think the Golden Globes this year made better choices than they usually do, by the way. It was pretty unusual and gutsy of them to award a foreign show that almost no one in America besides people who have BBC America, has ever seen. The Office, of course.

The Emmys? Don't hold your breath.

So many films become popular, with teens especially, because of violent and/or sexual content. So it doesn't follow that the reason films are popular is because they are of good quality. Film makers seem more interested in shocking or titillating the audience than in character development and plot lines.

There are so many television channels available these days. The networks are desperate to get your attention. I guess they figure that creating a well-crafted drama for adults isn't the way to do that.

I will admit to not watching award shows anymore. They seldom honor anyone I like. So maybe the problem is with me. Nah. Surely not.

H

Just because bad movies can be popular doesn't mean that good movies are not popular. The awards have a certain dignity though. It's not as if "Dude Where's My Car?" could have possibly won best picture, though it was relatively popular.

I have about 700 channels I love it when the Cable channels try to come up with a reality show that vaguely relates to their main subject (IE, the SciFi channel now has a hidden camera reality show - which has very very little to do with Science Fiction. Then again, I only watch SciFi when they rerun episodes of the Twilight Zone)

Over the years, I've disregarded with every major award show. They're useless, really.

In the old days my favorite award show was the Grammys. Now I don't even watch that one. You can tell you're getting old when you can't understand the lyrics anymore.

*listening to a Frank Sinatra CD*

H

Award shows are the most boring self-congratulatory luvvie fests known to man. Lets give each other prizes for producing something that wasn't quite as cp as everything else was.


You know The Return of the King will win Best Picture, and Jackson Best Director at this years Oscars, because they should have doen it for the Fellowship but cked that up.


And as for lifetime achievement awards

"Here we beter give you this worthless little statue because we don't think we'll be seeing you without headstone this time next year

Breathe in...breathe out...

You're right on all counts. What's worse is that they often wait until someone has actually died and then give them an award. I hate that.

That's why I want a closed casket when I die. If they can't come see me when I'm alive, I don't want them looking at me when I'm dead.

'Let us learn to show our friendship for a man while he is alive rather than after he is dead.'

One of the reasons why I tend to look on the Oscars as a guilty pleasure of a freakshow rather than something with any integrity or significance is because they're so political - and by that I mean studio-political and culture-political rather than party-political.

If it was an industry backslap for people who'd made the biggest grosses, well, that I could get my head round. If it was a flagrantly highbrow event which rewarded technical excellence quite independently of factors like box office and fame and marketing that'd be fine too.

But they're neither. So you end up with this situation where many Oscars are effectively body-of-work awards, all non-English language films are shunted into one or two categories, and the 'best film' category is virtually always won by a big studio picture which seems to have been specifically designed for that purpose.

Not that I'm saying things would be better if every category was a matter of public vote, of course...

Well, public votes are not the way to go either. The public just voted to put an alleged rapist in the basketball all star game.

They vote with their tickets at the box office anyway. Ok, maybe I'm strange, but I've never decided to see a film because it won an award. So if others are like me, how much do the awards really mean?

H

The only reason I can see for award shows is to keep Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg in work.

*alleged* rapist. Plus, his personal life doesn't make him a bad basketball player.

I saw A Beautiful Mind because it won best film at the Oscars one year. But I probably would have eventually seen it anyway. It's pretty good.

However, there's often a big buzz about the better films anyway. Like this year, if LotR wins best picture, I very much doubt that many people will choose to see it additionally - it was already pretty well circulated throughout the world. I very much doubt that many people will suddenly become aware of this previously unknown film.

Speaking of the Best Picture award, who do you think should/will win it Awix? (if I may appeal to your widsom about films)

Simulpost.

KJ - Good point.

Winning a big Oscar does tend to significnt bump a film's box office, so it seems many people are swayed by these things (or at the very least the attendant publicity).

It won't bump LotR, Awix, 'cos everyone's already seen it. Three times.

Are you allowed the same Oscar again next year for the same show? That's all that LotR is, in spite of it's scale and quality. It's the same show continued after another year-long commercial break.

Do Kill Bill or Spirited Away stand to win anything, do you know? They were my favourites last year. Maybe I'm Turning Japanese...

Pin

Spirited Away won an Oscar last year, Pin, and well deserved it was too. I am aware of what a tiny minority I'm in re Kill Bill (to say I was ambivalent about it is an understatement) so the less said there the better.

The point about LotR (which I've only seen once, so far, though I'm planning to see it again sooner or later) is well made and may explain why the first two films didn't win the Oscars they deserved to. RotK will win awards on behalf of the whole trilogy, even though I don't necessarily think it's the best bit.

(Can the same thing win the same award two years in a row? Depends on the awards and who votes I expect. I seem to recall that at the UK's biggest open-to-the-public-vote SF & Fantasy awards the Buffy episode with the songs won 'best individual episode' two years running.)

I knew that...
(shuffles in embarrassment)

The less said about "Kill Bill"? Well, I don't know. I thought it was good escapism. Films like that wipe my head in a way; you come out purged. I suppose maybe I'm tying outside life-events into the film to some degree, and letting them affect my judgement of it...

You know where I'm coming from here? OK, well, maybe I'd better spell it out. Kill Bill is a pretty good film to see with a partner, and then kind of express yourself afterwards. Just a personal opinion.

IMHO, you don't really get that kind of spin-off from Miyazaki, on the whole.

The less said by me, anyway.

I shall now completely ignore my own advice and say that while I found Kill Bill to be technically well made (although the limitations of Tarantino's style are becoming obvious), I couldn't engage with the story at all. Barely a single sympathetic character, for one thing, and... well, everyone says the comedy mutilations were just escapism, no harm done, so it's okay to laugh at them as the director intended. So presumably if he goes on to make a zany escapist comedy about the adventures of a serial killer (which, come to think of it, is essentially what Kill Bill is) or a wacky paedophile, that'll be okay too as long as the jokes are good and it's stylishly made.

Or, to put it another way, if you set out to make a pastiche of some bad films, perfect to the last detail, then if you succeed you're going to end up with another bad film.

Let the flaming begin...

We'll have no flaming here, please. We're way too laid back for that.

We will have polite disagreement, however. Ahem.....My age is showing again, but I think films like Kill Bill are unfortunate. And I'm surprised that one hasn't already been made about your zany neighborhood pedophile.

Young people buy the movie tickets, so the producers and directors don't give a rip what my generation thinks. I'm aware of that, and that's fine. I also realize that young people like to push the envelope. That's ok, too. Been there. I'm an ageing hippie, remember?

The problem, as I see it, is that succeeding generations have pushed farther and farther and have crossed the boundries of what is witty and fun and a little daring into sicko territory. And when that becomes commonplace (we're nearly there) and fails to titillate, then what's next?

We already have rap lyrics that glorify killing policemen and panties (knickers) for 5 year olds that have 'eat me' printed on the crotch. Movies that have no character development and very little plot are successful because they throw in the formula amount of nudity, violence and profanity.

Where does it end? How gross will movies have to get before there's a backlash and people stop spending their hard-earned money on this garbage?

*wanders over to sit in the corner and wait for someone to throw a at her*

To one ageing hippy from another - don't you find that stark-reality-violence makes you feel more vengeful/scared/generally antisocial than nonsense-violence?
In that respect, Kill Bill had no lasting effect on me other than a slight afterglow, like remembering having been on a rollercoaster or something.
On the other hand, the iconic movie for ageing hippies, Easy Rider, left me angry for years.
Could be time-of-life, sure, but I think it has more to do with believability.

I agree that you can sometimes tackle controversial subjects with humor and get away with it more easily that using a reality-based format. Especially when they are dealt with gently. And we certainly react differently to the same films depending on our backgrounds. Easy Rider made me depressed and angry and a little frightened. But after watching it, I was positive that I wasn't interested in that lifestyle.

I agree that this subject can be treated humorously. But my question is if a bumbling contract killer is today's subject for farce, then why not the neighborhood pedophile who get's his gonads caught in his zipper? How far are we going to go down this road? We have a film industry that doesn't think it should have any limits or any responsibility.

I don't think that cold-blooded murder is funny. I would rather have people take this subject seriously. I want my kids to be angry about sensless violence rather than entertained by it. I want a killer portrayed as a bad person, not just a clown.

Too many films are made as easy sells. Writing good scripts with good character development and integrated plotting is hard work. It's much simpler to throw a bumbling idiot onto the screen, thrown in some blood, a few screams, a bare bum or two, some power tools and rake in the ticket sales.