Don't worry about awards

People have been complaining on some of the blogs I visit about how their favorite show didn't win any Emmys.

One guy was really upset that The Wire (which I've never seen) didn't win something. "It's sort of proof if you needed any that the Emmys are not something that should be taken seriously."

Well, I think most folks knew that the Emmys were, and always have been, something not worth taking seriously. But that's not because The Wire didn't win. It's because awards shouldn't be taken seriously. John Adams winning best miniseries doesn't legiitmize the Emmys just because it happened to be the best miniseries.

I first learned that awards were a fraud when I was 14 and Star Wars lost to Annie Hall for Best Picture. I knew the fix was in and that the Academy were all a bunch of phonies.

However, I find awards and prizes are useful for hinting at a group of products that might be worth experiencing. When I don't know what the cool kids are listening to, I check out the Mercury Prize, or the NME Awards and listen to all of 'em. Some of the bands are actually pretty good. The same with the Pulitzers and the Bookers and the Whitbreads and so on. They help me filter for the "best" stuff to read.

When you're young, you either want the things you like to be liked only by you, or you want them to be liked by everybody. Personally, I always wanted to have a monopoly on the poets, and musicians, and films, and oblique little journals I enjoyed because I didn't want anyone else to be smart or sophisticated enough to "get" them like I did; it made me feel smarter. But it's been a long time since I felt that little frisson of pleasure from discovering some tattered reprint of an obscure French proto-Imagist poet in the back stacks at Powell's Books and, really, I don't miss it.