The season is upon us once again. A time where people gather together to flaunt their wealth, organizers spend ridiculously large amounts of money, the tickets are out of reach for us “mere mortals”, and the participants spend several hours ” patting each other on the back” , lavishing praise, and platitudes on each other, and of course being watch by millions of people.
Welcome to “distraction season” or, to give it its correct title, Awards season.
The Oscars, The Golden Globes, The BAFTA’s, The Emmy’s, The Screen Actors Guild Awards, Annual writers Guild Awards, and so it goes on. These award ceremonies capture the imagination of millions of people who are seduced by the glamour, the glitz, the luxury, the famous. But if you really look at it, if they don’t award themselves gongs, who is going to do it instead. Answer, no-one.
The awards ceremonies are for one thing and one thing only: to keep the focus squarely on Hollywood. The reason I use the word” distraction” is because it is another example of people being distracted from what is really going on, and the real issues in the world.
We use actors and musicians for everything now. For politics, charity work, disaster appeals, advertising, plugging multinational companies, the list goes on and on. These days, if a star is not associated with any of the above categories, then people seem to have no interest, in the topic. Which again draws back to the reason why they have these award shows. It is to keep themselves and the industries they work in, in the spotlight. Even the language which now accompanies these ceremonies seems to have changed. The words ‘ hot’ ‘new sex symbol’ ‘goddess’ ‘screen hunk’ ‘the world’s sexiest….’ have now replaced the words which were once used to describe their acting skills or musical talent. If you further integrate the world of fashion into the equation, the ‘clothing’ now requires just as much coverage as the things previously mentioned.
Most of the people who win these awards also get the opportunity to ‘politicise’ their foundation, charity, or cause which they support. This too is becoming all too common now. The world has had many different problems for many years, but the speeches doled out nowadays make it seem like these problems have only just begun to happen. (Global warming, food shortages, natural disasters, endangered animals to name but a few).
There are some wonderful actors and actresses out there, and I myself have watched many powerful performances by very talented individuals, and this is where the focus should be stronger, but unfortunately, this is not enough these days to us ‘masses’ with very short attention & boredom spans. They need to inject glamour, sex, scandal, gossip into the proceedings to get our undivided attention.
In conclusion, I hope that the world of music and acting continues to produce outstanding talent, but I long for the days where the focus was where it should be.
