Fuck all the awards

People asked me about who was going to win the Academy Awards this year, like I could give a fuck.

When I was eight years old, I had a magazine that listed all the Oscar winners up to 1982, and I memorised every fact in that mag, taking note of all the big names of all the big films, and wondering how something called Annie Hall could have won in the year Star Wars came out.

That's about as much as I ever cared. By the time I got seriously interested in movies in my late teens, I realized that the Oscars didn't mean shit - they never recognised the films I thought were the best, and rewarded the bland over the innovative.

But there is a whole huge industry behind the awards, and a lot of people have a lot of money riding on them, so they're not going anywhere.

And putting on award shows is literally a big business, I once worked for a company that put them on for a little while, and went to several for things like appliance stores, with people getting very excited for taking the award for best store under 10,000 sqm.

The most awards I've been to are for news journalism, and the team I worked in has scooped a few of them. I understand why people get excited about them, but my main memories of those awards - apart from getting to catch up with old colleagues - is of unworthy winners and monstrous omissions. The very worst night of my professional life was spent at one of these awards shows, listening to the big boss at my work spew on about doing great journalism, while I was about to quit because every choice that boss was making was objectively making it worse.

Of course I do like it when my friends get honoured, because it does make them happy and I like it when they're happy and I'm not enough of a monster to shit on that happiness.

But I don't want awards, and I never, ever seek them out. I find vying for them distasteful, and purely egocentric. The work is the reward, I don't give a shit what baubles it conveys, and I certainly don't give a shit who wins best picture every year.