As Moira Rose, played by the late great Catherine O’Hara, once put it, there is no season better than award season. Expected actors clamor through clapping crowds to hoist their golden man; small and skeptical directors deliver speeches like preachers and audiences react with ambiguity at these winners. The most famed shows, such as the Oscars, Emmys, Tonys and Grammys, have long drawn controversy. Whether through Will Smith’s altercation with Chris Rock in 2022 or La La Land’s dubious ‘win’ for Best Picture in 2016, the season of awards has become a manufacturer of industry drama, viral social media clips, but above all, a determinant of the best of the best in film, television and music, year after year.
Subsequently, these winners (and thus losers) face scrutiny for the legitimacy of their choosing. Most award shows, including the Oscars, the Grammys, the Emmys, the BAFTAs and the CMAs, to name a few, award solely based on industry professionals’ votes. The Critics’ Choice Awards is one of the popular exceptions, with nominations and voting done by film and television critics alone. Whether it’s a Grammy or a Golden Globe, these shiny golden trophies decorate famous performers and artists’ careers into legacies. But with the voting so mundanely allocated and decided upon by the same cohort of elites, how much can they really mean?
For each award show, the amount of participants voting on these acclamations varies. As of 2022, while the Emmys have a body of 25,000 members, the Oscars has a mere 9,400 members in contrast. For the Grammys, their Recording Academy consists of 11,000 members. While these groups are subject to expansion, these members, and their voting practices, remain completely anonymous. These discretly secret ‘expert’ committees provide little to no transparency to both artists and audiences on how they vote and by what criteria they use.
These bodies of voters have faced immense backlash over the years for the disproportionate absence of black and female artists from category nominations and wins. For example, in 2015, when Selma, a film portraying MLK Jr. ‘s story, was nominated for Best Picture, neither the actor who played him, David Oyelowo, nor any of the supporting cast, nor the director, Ava DuVernay, received nominations. This is not only incredibly rare for a Best Picture nominee, but it also emphasized a greater systemic corruption within the voting process that largely diminished or disregarded the work of black artists and performers, particularly women. At those Oscars in 2015, when every single winner for acting categories was white, controversy was sparked online, with the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite trending for two weeks straight.
As a result, the Oscars pledged to double their women and people of color members by 2020. While this diversity might seem like a box-checking effort by these committees, diversity is immensely important in all facets of creativity and art, and they should be represented and awarded with such significance. Films with pluralistic perspectives have been shown to perform better in voting and receive better audience reactions and acclimations at festivals such as Sundance and Cannes. Especially in the world’s hyper-polarized climate today, a variety of perspectives is not only important but necessary to foster greater understanding of other experiences. For artists, whether actors, directors, music producers or singers, what is the point of creating if not to share pieces of your perspectives? Without diversity in film, television and music nominations, those varying outlooks lose accessibility in the shadows of nomination visibility and legitimacy.