Are Most Award Shows Fairness Or Favoritism?

[Bartmanhomer]

It's just occurred that most TV shows, movies, music and even the Razzies awarded multiple times because it's very good. So my question is are most award shows show fairness or favouritism? :confused:

[Khedrac]

I suspect that the best answer to that is "no".

They are not about favouitism, except that that is exactly what they are about - what is the difference between what a judge thinks is "best" and their favourite? That said, I don't think it is what you mean by "favouritism" - I think that for most awards the judges honestly make the effort to be impartial and set aside their preferences and choose "the best".

However, and it is a big however, the judges cannot review all the possibilities; they certainly review the entire shortlist, but they may not be involved in choosing that shortlist.
Take the Oscars - the film companies choose which films they want considered for each category and create very expensive packs containing copies of the films for the judges. This has two problems - one is that the fancy packaging is designed to influsence the judges thus affecting the impartiality; but the second problem is bigger - if the film companies don't think a film worth pushing it's not going to be seen by the judges and cannot win - even if it turns out to be far better than all of the other films of the year.

So, to find out what drives most awards you need to find out how the shortlist is selected, and then you can categorise how that award is chosen.

[Bohandas]

More than anything else, what award shows really are is filler. They somehow manage to pad the announcement of a couple dozen names into a tedious multiple hours long event.

[Seppl]

They are industry awards. It is not about who is best, but whom the entertainment industry wants you to think is best. In the end, these awards are not worth more than "cereal of the year" or similar prizes, the entertainment industry is just much better at self-promotion than the cereal industry is. After all, it is their job to sell you entertaining illusions.

[Saintheart]

I'm deeply concerned that if I provide an accurate answer on this one that none of the shows the OP watches in future will be worthy of Oscars :smallbiggrin:

[Bartmanhomer]

I'm deeply concerned that if I provide an accurate answer on this one that none of the shows the OP watches in future will be worthy of Oscars :smallbiggrin:

Well, I watch the Oscars every year and I do notice there some degree of favouritism with certain categories. Such as Moonlight winning for best pictures. :annoyed:

[Mechalich]

They are industry awards. It is not about who is best, but whom the entertainment industry wants you to think is best. In the end, these awards are not worth more than "cereal of the year" or similar prizes, the entertainment industry is just much better at self-promotion than the cereal industry is. After all, it is their job to sell you entertaining illusions.

The various industry groups are made up of actual people though, and those people do actually vote on things. The awards aren't wholly pre-determined.

Rather than favoritism, its better to speak of bias. Different industry groups have different biases - movies make this fairly obvious by having groups with clearly varied priorities, like screen actors vs. producers, vote on roughly the same things. And clearly, the opinions of what makes a great film will be different for people in those groups and will also be different from that of the general public. Additionally, smaller industry groups are simply more likely to express significant bias for statistical reasons. The Golden Globes, to use a notable example, are the awards given out by the Hollywood Foreign Press, which has only ~90 members. That's small enough that the specific opinions of a literal handful of people can skew the process.

There's also a common form of bias in that while awards are officially bestowed for contributions within some specific fictional work, they are given out to actual people. This means there tends to be substantial blurring between the specific achievement in question and the overall body of work belonging to the person under consideration. This is particularly noticeable in terms of awards for acting, where the voters are peers. This often leads to recognition out of a sense that a specific person 'deserves' a reward at the present to compensate for earlier achievements that were not suitably recognized.

Another form of bias is towards well known productions or even productions that enter the popular consciousness in close chronological proximity to awards consideration. That's because the people who vote for these things tend to be busy and they simply don't have the time to give full consideration to everything out there, especially with something time consuming like movies. For example, with the Oscars it has become extremely common in recent years for films with Acting category nominations to match up with films also seeking Best Picture nominations, because that minimizes the number of films a voter has to theoretically watch. Likewise if awards voting is in December, then dimly recalled films that appeared in February face an uphill struggle for recognition simply due to the nature of human memory.

It should be noted that non-industry awards do exist. The People's Choice Awards is perhaps the most notable in the US and currently uses online voting; Avengers: Endgame won Movie of 2019. However, awards of that nature have their own biases, in particularly they are highly vulnerable to manipulation by works or persons with followers of outsized dedication. Case in point: Beyoncé won Animated Movie Star of 2019.

Ultimately determining the 'best' of something, even within a recognizably limited timeframe such as a single year, is a very difficult task and there's no ideal way to go about it.

[Kitten Champion]

Nothing in life is fair, especially the generic concept of "Award Shows". The issues which one could criticize for an industry award - entertainment or otherwise - would be dependent on the specific methodology used by said awards. It's like asking "are sports fair?" and having an intelligible answer.

Generally they're nothing more than a promotion and celebration for the industry as the whole, which is... fine. It's really - objectively speaking - not important to the world in general. It's not going to set off the chain of events that leads to Skynet or the Apes taking over if one movie/show/car/musical wins over another. They exists ultimately to the mutual benefit for the industry by showing their unity behind their craft and highlighting their successes.

The problem with the Oscars - as it's the one people take seriously outside of Nobel Prizes - is that it's become a cultural and political battleground every year which makes every award into a potential landmine and open to criticism. No one cares if someone won an Oscar erroneously if it's for some niche technical craft or whatever, it's when it gets caught in the wider politics of the day for the movies you've seen or at least heard about that the integrity and fairness of the awards matter.

Though there's also awards like The Game Awards where the bigger problems is they don't treat the awards as being meaningful much at all - fair or not - and the whole thing is essentially an excuse for targeted advertising.

[Jay R]

Virtually no judge is always controlled by favoritism, and virtually no judge can always be fair. The judges are people, and people are neither saints nor demons.

It follows that there will always be a mix of favoritism and fairness. 0% and 100% are not the only possible answers, and are in fact the least likely possibilities.


"The brotherhood of man is no mere poet's fancy. It is a most depressing and humiliating reality."

-- Oscar Wilde

[Saintheart]

Look, if the damn judges don't even see half the films they are voting on and haven't done so for years (https://www.rd.com/culture/what-hollywood-insiders-wont-tell-you-about-the-academy-awards/), how can the award shows even be valid, let alone fair or biased?

[snowblizz]

If the stuff you liked got recognition it was fair. If the stuff you disliked got recognition it was favouritism.

/thread

[Lord Raziere]

If the stuff you liked got recognition it was fair. If the stuff you disliked got recognition it was favouritism.

/thread

ha. ha. ha. its funny because subjectivism is depressing because it means no one can even agree on basic things like the definition of words and thus no one can understand each other, leading to all social interaction seeming like chaos that can't be solved, so why bother trying. No wait, its not funny at all.

[Bavarian itP]

Fairness, clearly.

I mean, what's the point if they're not fair?

[Theaitetos]

Award shows are worthless. Just like movie critics are bought & paid for, award shows do whatever the owner(s) tell them to do.

I think the future lies in providing several avenues of information about something; I really like the way Steam gives you information about games: Player ratings in general, player ratings recently, what your friends are playing, what your favorite critics are recommending. That's more valuable than awards, as you can tailor your information to your own taste, e.g. by choosing critics who like the same games you do and dislike the same games you do.

[Droid Tony]

At worst they are nothing: pure fluff and at best they are a meaningless waste of time.

In some vague sense there is an idea to ''honor" someone who does hard work and give a public 'thumbs up''. But, then you have the Circle Problem: If A is ''good" then that makes B to Z all ''bad"....except they don't really want to say that, they kinda want to say B to Z are also 'good', just er not ''as good" as A.

And that is on top of Bias, Politics, Society, Secret Societies, and lots of other social stuff.

[Khedrac]

I think people are actually being unecessarily harsh on industry awards.

I am not saying that some don't deserve it, but there are others that are better than people make out.

For example, I used to wonder why the late Diana Wynne Jones wasn't nomiated for more fiction awards in the UK - her works were certainly good enough; then I found out that she had been on the judging panel for a significant portion of her career (hence no nominations).

When you get vey good and well respected authors on the judging panel, you know that the judges are trying to be as fair as they can - they may not succeeed for many of the previously mentioned factors, but they try.

[JoshL]

My tastes tend toward the fringes, so most of what I like isn't even going to be covered by award shows. It's nice when someone else acknowledges that they like a thing you do though, so I get that. But sometimes they get a little absurd. The Oscars, for example, don't judge every film, they only judge those submitted, and there are criteria for if a film even CAN be submitted. So it becomes not "best picture" but "best from a narrow selection of a certain type of picture"

My favorite award show absurdity happened in the MTV music awards in 1994. Bad Religion were nominated for "best new artist". They formed in 1980. The song was from their 8th full length album (and was even a rerecorded version from their fifth). Maybe they were new to mtv, you might think, but they had videos years before that. Nominations come from the labels, and they were an indie act, so maybe new to the label? Nope, it was their second album on a major label. I struggled to find any way in which they could be considered a new artist, and unless it was a prank to demonstrate how ignorant the selection committee was, it was a demonstration of how absurd the whole thing is.

But, again, it's nice to see others like the things you like, and it's cool to see recognition for the crew behind the scenes, who most people are barely aware of

[Lemmy]

The amount of bias varies from show to show, of course...

But stuff like the Oscars is basically marketing, elitism and politics.

Even though the choice is made by people who at least in theory are much better qualified to judge film-making than the general population, winners are nearly always chosen based on factors completely unrelated to actual movie quality... Making the whole thing completely pointless (and rather boring), which is part of the reason the show has lost audienxe year after year. No one wants to watch a 3h borefest just to see the award go to some pretentious film no one cares about.

Life is too short to waste on millionaires' circlejerk.

[Psyren]

If the stuff you liked got recognition it was fair. If the stuff you disliked got recognition it was favouritism.

/thread

This.


ha. ha. ha. its funny because subjectivism is depressing because it means no one can even agree on basic things like the definition of words and thus no one can understand each other, leading to all social interaction seeming like chaos that can't be solved, so why bother trying. No wait, its not funny at all.

Not all social interaction involves deciding what is best.

[Bartmanhomer]

The amount of bias varies from show to show, of course...

But stuff like the Oscars is basically marketing, elitism and politics.

Even though the choice is made by people who at least in theory are much better qualified to judge film-making than the general population, winners are nearly always chosen based on factors completely unrelated to actual movie quality... Making the whole thing completely pointless (and rather boring), which is part of the reason the show has lost audience year after year. No one wants to watch a 3h borefest just to see the award go to some pretentious film no one cares about.

Life is too short to waste on millionaires' circlejerk.
I do agree that Oscar is just the popularity of biases to some extent. But I do enjoy it for the Best Animated Film.

[Bohandas]

Even if I cared about who won one, or even all, of the categories there's no way I'd ever watch the award ceremony; I'd just look up the list of winners the next day.

[Precure]

Both, as they're voted by many.

[Jerrykhor]

This is kind of a dumb question, sorry to be blunt. What exactly is 'Fairness'? What is fair for me, may not be fair for you. Its like the Paper saying:"Scissors is OP, pls nerf. Rock is fine."

And what is 'Favoritism'? Lets say A and B both watch a movie, and they love it. But along came C, who thinks that movie is trash. But the movie still wins an award, because A and B outnumber C. C claims this is unfair and biased, but A and B disagrees.

[Bartmanhomer]

I can't give you an example of fairness and favouritism. Take superheroes movies, for example, every year in the Oscar most superheroes get only nominated for Special Effects. To me, it's very unfair that most superhero movie doesn't get to shine in Best Pictures. However, there was one superhero movie got nominated for Best Pictures and it was Black Panther even though that the Notebook won for Best Pictures last year. I feel like that Black Panther deserved to win for Best Pictures but Black Panther did win other awards for Best Costume and etc.