Is Hollywood’s Awards Season Too Long?
Every year, bloggers and media companies around the world spend months talking about, examining and dissecting every nuance of what has become Hollywood’s “Awards Season”, a time of the year which usually kicks off around November and lasts through until the Oscars, in Late February or early March. For an industry that’s awfully self-involved most of the time anyway, one could argue that a five month season of back-slapping and handshakes is probably not long enough, but since the Academy’s Governor’s Ball took place only the other week and the Oscars themselves not until February 22nd, it’s time to ask: is Hollywood’s Awards Season too long?
Every year, bloggers and media companies around the world spend months talking about, examining and dissecting every nuance of what has become Hollywood’s “Awards Season”, a time of the year which usually kicks off around November and lasts through until the Oscars, in Late February or early March. For an industry that’s awfully self-involved most of the time anyway, one could argue that a five month season of back-slapping and handshakes is probably not long enough, but since the Academy’s Governor’s Ball took place only the other week and the Oscars themselves not until February 22nd, it’s time to ask: is Hollywood’s Awards Season too long?
If you Google all the awards bestowed upon movies and the movie industry each year, it might very well take you a good several days to wade through them all. Everyone from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (which hosts the Golden Globes, and is comprised of a bunch of media people who don’t even live in America!) to the various Guilds throughout the industry, to the vaunted Academy of Motion Pictures, has a turn at handing out all manner of gongs and trophies to “deserving” people involved in the creation of our favorite medium – film.
Imagine, Meryl Streep whisked from one four hour awards show honoring the Best Boys to another celebrating the Key Grip, then straight to the Golden Globes (with a wheelbarrow, she’s won so many gongs) and then, lastly, the Oscars. By my reckoning you could do all the major awards inside a day and we could all go back to watching movies rather than watching awards shows about movies.
The three major shows – BAFTA, Golden Globes and Oscars – could be held on the same day: BAFTA in the morning (in England), the GG’s in the afternoon in New York, and the Oscars at night in LA. If you time the plane flights properly, you’ll be chasing the sun around the globe for about 12 hours, but it’s manageable!
Okay, so that’s not gonna happen, but the Academy should recognize that by the time the Oscars roll around, everyone – and I mean everyone – has “awards fatigue”. Here at Fernby Films we try to cover all the major shows, because it’s a pop-culture thing and it’s often historic, but by the time we get to Best Picture during hour four of the telecast, we’re just about done. Each award show wants its own time in the sun, because they all aspire to greatness (but seriously, who remembers who snagged the Director’s Guild Best Picture in 2004 without resorting to Google?) but I think it’s about time we mandated a shorter awards season to save us all from the tiresome “Nominated for umpteen [insert award name] Awards” posters blaring at us from every marketable corner.
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