Remember Award Shows Before Thought Pieces?

I did not watch the VMAs last night but my understanding is that Kanye West is going to run for president in 2020, Justin Bieber flew over a crowd looking like Jesus and then broke into a bout of tears, Nicki Minaj found herself embroiled in an altercation against the evening’s primarily-naked host, Miley Cyrus, and the two chose a very public, very literal platform to express their respective lament.

The contention has since culminated in at least a dozen thought pieces that littered my Twitter feed this morning (striking a similar argument about white privilege that defined the Minaj-Swift debacle of yesteryore) sprinkled over the “Kanye is a god,” or adversely, “Kanye is an idiot” rhetoric. What I have not seen are any objective reviews of the performances, any opinions on the winners or frankly, a critical look at the music industry independent of the drama that circumscribes it.

When I look back at the award ceremonies I do watch: The Golden Globes, The Emmys, The Oscars, it is rare that I should find myself as interested in the subject matter being honored (film, television, etc) as I am in the outfits, the implications of the outfits, the mannerisms of the celebrities, the general notion of Celebrity and so forth.

So when did it happen that the awards stopped being about the thing and became about our opinions? What were award shows like before they were defined by thought pieces — when they were still the bubblegum that anchors a cultural moment to its de facto period in time?

In an industry like entertainment that is so wildly contingent on “getting the inside scoop,” it makes perfect sense that such personal affairs would seep into the public consciousness; that you’d expect Justin Bieber, or Nicki Minaj to spark talking points for the next day’s news. But have we really entered an era where the separation of church and state — that is, the separation of that which deserves the megaphone treatment and that which commands it by pure function of our cultural obsession with tabloids — is so muddled that we can’t quite ascertain the difference between what we believe deserves 2500 words in a reputed journal and what doesn’t?

Should we have never allowed the 4th wall to break?

Or maybe more accurately: are we finally looking at award shows with socially-critical eyes? The eyes of jaded individuals who can believe what we’re seeing — because by now, we’ve seen it all — we just can’t believe that we’re still watching.

Photographs via The New York Times.

The post Remember Award Shows Before Thought Pieces? appeared first on Man Repeller.