Awards Shows Suck!
Mike Leitao ~ 02/05/2024
The Grammys just recently happened and from all accounts, it was apparently a decent event this year. Most people seemed happy with the winners and other than a couple one off moments the event was well liked. This is a huge accomplishment, since 99% of the time awards shows are some of the worst television that has ever been put out.
This is not just hate for the Grammys. This is hate for all award shows, whether they are for film, music, sports, or anything inbetween. Most complaints on these events are normally people bitching about a bunch of rich and famous people getting together and patting themselves on the back for all the hard work they did over the last year, but as a normal person who cares about real things I could not care any less about that aspect of award shows. I hate award shows so much for a much simpler reason, they take forever and are incredibly boring.
If you take a step back to really think about the purpose of award shows you’ll find that their main purpose is to recognize the best of their respective genres. So why is it that the actual recognition portion of these shows make up maybe 10% of the content. If you look at the other 90% that make up the rest of the show, you got about 45% of bad monologues from hosts and other celebrities that are mostly really cringe with maybe one or two decent jokes, and the other 45% is just watching performances that range from decent to clear cut wastes of time. For things like sports award shows, why are we having a random non sports celebrity being the host and trying to relate to these athletes, which always goes poorly, followed by a bunch of random music performances that half the time the genre of music is clearly not in line with the type of music those sports fans would normally listen to. Similarly for music award shows, why is the host not a musician and why is it that the music acts are always just people who aren’t even up for the awards? Like, why are they there performing? It’s as if they are lesser performers who are expected to entertain the top tier talents, it’s very strange. I would love for someone to actually give me a real reason to spend three hours watching an award show when I can just wait till the next morning and scroll through one instagram post that tells me who won what awards.
Now you know me, I am not just a complainer, but I am a problem solver. So now it is time for me to take on award shows and how I would fix them to make them must watch television. Firstly, as much as I hate hosts and their monologues, they are unfortunately needed. So our fix is going to be that the host should have a direct correlation to the event they would be hosting. I want sports personalities doing sports shows, actors doing the Oscars, musicians doing the Grammys, etc. Secondly, would be shortening the monologues. Although they are needed, the same way an essay needs an intro paragraph, they do not need to be anywhere near as long as they currently are. Shortening them would allow them to go over better and in turn be slightly funnier which would get the event started off on the right foot, which is super important for them.
Next up would be getting rid of all the performances. I know some people tune in specifically for the performances and it is a big reason that some people even watch at all. I don’t care, get rid of them and you can have other shows that are all about doing performances. The award shows should be clearly focused on the awards and recognizing the best of the best, not some random ass person with no relation to any of the awards performing a song or two. By shifting the focus onto the actual awards over the theatrics, it would make the show more enjoyable for people who follow the industry throughout the whole year.
Sure, these shows are for the performers but they should also be for the fans who follow all year long and have strong opinions on who should win what. The next fix is more of a fix that comes from the above mentioned fixes. By doing all of this, the time of these shows would drastically decrease. I’m thinking these shows are 60-90 minutes, which would make it easy to watch and see all the awards, as opposed to currently having to sift through all the extra garbage to see the winners live. The last thing is less of a fix and more of an addition. I think by cutting out all the filler so the show was focused on the awards you could add in a fan vote so fans could see the official decisions compared to who the fans think should win. It would add another element to the award show that I feel fans would appreciate and it would also help bring buzz to the events as people discuss the fan vote versus the actual vote. These things are not hard, it’s honestly quite embarrassing that it even needs to be discussed, but this is what they keep me around for so I’ll take it.
