Awards season ruined cinema, but I no longer care about little gold men

Between the Globes and the Grammys and the Oscars and the ridiculously named Actor Awards, there’s a specific, frantic pressure that settles over the cinematic landscape this time of year. It bubbles up in lines at the cinema and on Letterboxd and in water cooler conversations.

It’s a high-stakes energy that demands we treat every film not as a piece of art but as a contestant in a pageant, and turns casual conversation about what we’ve liked into bigger, more loaded declarations of what’s worthy of winning little gold men.

I felt myself doing it in real-time last week when a colleague eagerly told me she’d seen Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Hamnet after dutifully reading the Maggie O’Farrell book it’s based on. Rather than chatting about the performances and the story and the emotional stakes of the Shakespeare what-if, I began talking about whether it deserved its recent Golden Globe for Best Motion Drama.

I can admit when I’m annoying! And I often am! But this time of year, it’s a kind of annoying I spot everywhere.

I can’t just say I had a good time during Marty Supreme – I have to compare the first films the Safdie brothers made since parting ways, or have a take on whether Timothée Chalamet will snatch that Oscar I’d mentally assigned to Leonardo DiCaprio this year.

Everywhere I look, people are doing the same, discussing One Battle After Another’s campaign strategy and whether genre films like Sinners will ever get a look-in. No mention of the stories these films told or the effect they had on us. Were we always so haughty and insufferable?

Something can’t just be good or bad during this time of year; it has to mean something more, be deserving of industry recognition – even in the eyes of people who are quick to declare the nebulous “industry” is so prone to getting things wrong.

And it doesn’t just happen with movies. Twitter was up in arms the day it was announced that TV’s hottest show, Heated Rivalry, wouldn’t be eligible for Emmys or Globes because it was a Canadian production, not an American one. It didn’t matter that we’ve all entered a months-long collective psychosis where it’s impossible to stop thinking about this decade-long love story between closeted professional athletes. What does it mean if it doesn’t win?!

Noticing these patterns – in other people and myself – has me relishing the feeling of stepping out of the cultural vacuum and forgoing a hot takes all together. It’s something akin to JOMO (Joy of Missing Out) when you let all the “must-see” discourse pass you by.

I felt it last year when, on a long-haul flight to London, I decided to finally press play on Todd Phillips’ Joker. When it was released in 2019, the discourse around the movie was deafening and inescapable. Praising it was like a dog whistle; it said something about you as a person, your morals, and whether you hated women. It was heavy baggage for what is, I learned, six years on, quite a good movie all on its own.

Squeezed into a middle seat in a pressurised cabin somewhere over the Indian Ocean, covered in unidentifiable dust from a day of snacking, I got to experience the movie on its own merits. It was dark and tragic and shocking. Robert De Niro’s incredible performance as talk-show host Murray Franklin made me want to rewatch Network, with its famously mad-as-hell TV anchor Howard Beale. Without having to pick a side in a social media culture war, I got to just have a good time for a couple of hours, then move on.

It’s something I’m determined to do more of, whether by doing my best to ignore the hype or just to revisiting old classics.

I’m taking this approach to its logical, 12-hour-extended-edition conclusion this weekend, when I’ll finally watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time.

Released when I was in my early teens, there was nothing about the Peter Jackson epics that struck my fancy at the time, but these days the movies feel like a comforting conversation I’m curious to eavesdrop on.

The culture already made its conclusions about the Hobbits and all their goings-on two decades ago, so there’s no pressure. Getting to sink into a significant story is a gift; bypassing the awards season hype is just a bonus.

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