By: Miguel Ángel Ardila (12°A)
The Oscars are “awards for artistic and technical merit in the film industry. Given annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science (AMPAS), the awards are an international recognition of excellence in cinematic achievements as assessed by the Academy's voting membership.”
This event tends to cause a lot of controversy, because the Oscars usually decide to recognize what makes them look politically correct, giving the award to films that show racism, sexual orientation discrimination, sexism, etc. Themes such as these are almost guaranteed a statuette or at least a nomination, because it seems like the Academy wants to be in good terms with society, but by pleasing society, they make cinema fans angry. Also, the AMPAS excludes international films from the nomination for Best Picture, “Parasite” in this year’s Oscars being the first foreign film to receive the prize. The Oscars also seem to have a problem with streaming services films, in particular with Netflix, which only took home one prize this year, given to an actress.
Now let’s talk about the Grammys. The Grammys are a ceremony where artists are recognized with a prize (a “Grammy”) presented by the Recording Academy. The annual presentation ceremony features performances by big artists, and the presentation of those awards that have a more popular interest. The last Grammy Awards took place in the Staples Center the 26th of January of this year.
The problem I noticed with the Grammys is similar to the problem the Oscars have: the award is not always given to the artist who “deserves it”, but to the one the audience wants, or the one that generates more rating. They choose the winner according to what is less risky for them as an enterprise. They only think about what produces more money, and there are a lot of situations where we’re left in shock and wondering the real value of these awards, to the point where artists do not care anymore and prefer not to attend to the ceremony, and the award’s name should be changed from “Best” to “Most Popular”. These two terms are not the same; they could recognize a song or an artist as the most popular without declaring it the best.
For example, in the 58th Annual Grammy Awards, on February 15th, 2016, the prize of Album of the year was given to Taylor Swift, for “1989”. I am not saying it was bad, but in my opinion, there where albums that deserved this recognition more than “1989” did, such as “To Pimp A Butterfly” by Kendrick Lamar and “Beauty Behind the Madness” by The Weekend.
“To Pimp A Butterfly”, for instance, is an intricate piece of art, where Kendrick tells us an exquisite narrative in first person, speaking about how he can influence people around him but fails to do so. We are taken through this album with a poem that relates all tracks and gives a closure to this storyline in the last song. Albums like this one should be the winners, not the ones that only talk about failed relationships and breakups, which of course can also make up the theme for a good album. However, it seems that the only way to win prizes is to make a pop album and be popular. But this is not a rant about other artists; this is directed to the Recording Academy, which underrates rap, R&B, rock, and other projects and, most of the time, overrates pop albums.
I can argue all day, but I prefer to bring a possible solution to this problem. Something I noticed is that when the awards are given, the Recording Academy and the AMPAS do not say what criteria they base their rankings on. They do not present arguments behind the winning of a prize. If they could explain and demonstrate why the winner is superior to the other nominees, maybe it would cause less controversy and the public could finally understand what variables define whether a movie or a musical piece is good enough to win such an anticipated prize.
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