Imagine a world with no Oscars. No awards telecast. No red carpet. No campaign season. No smear campaigns. No FYC events. 

Would it make movies better or worse? Make the industry more or less profitable? Would most Americans even really miss it?

I know. I’m delivering this hot take right in the middle of awards season. But what better awards season than this one to question the purpose of our modern awards industrial complex itself?

We’re right smack dab in between the Grammys and the Oscars, and both shows this year speak to some of the biggest problems I have with major awards shows. 

Let’s start with the Oscars and Emilia Perez. This film highlights two of my biggest Oscar gripes: That the wrong movies often score lots of nominations and win big at the Academy Awards, and that a lot of the time, a film’s Oscar campaign matters more than the quality of a film when deciding how much to award it. These two characteristics of the modern Oscars seemed to anoint Emilia Perez, a movie that’s gotten more critique than praise since its debut at Cannes in May. And yet, it snagged 13 Oscar nominations, and seemed to be on its way to a Best Picture win.

Then, in late January, actress Karla Sofía Gascón seemed to tank Emilia Perez all by herself, almost overnight, when dozens of her old tweets were resurfaced by a journalist. They showed the actress insulting everyone from Selena (both Quintanilla Perez and Gomez) to George Floyd to Islam with racist and insensitive quips. Netflix has distanced itself from Gascón, and the one-time Best Actress frontrunner may now be an also-ran.

One could see this as justice: the scandal means a movie that maybe shouldn’t win best picture probably won’t win best picture. Or the whole thing might just underscore my point: the campaign ultimately mattered more than the film. And this film – up for Best Picture – I maybe never deserved that nomination in the first place.

Perhaps one could see the Grammys this year as a bright spot. Beyoncé, finally, after bending the entire music industry to her will for over a decade, finally won the Grammy for Album of the Year on Sunday. Justice, right? Perhaps. But she’s deserved the award at least three times before. Her self-titled album introduced the surprise album drop, and changed the way the music industry does business. Before it, albums were always released on Tuesdays. And after, everyone moved to releasing albums on Fridays, because Beyoncé. Her next album, Lemonade, was the best-selling album in the world the year of its release. And the one after that, Renaissance? It was the most critically acclaimed of the decade so far, and spawned a world tour that became a cultural touchstone.

So to see her finally win the award, three albums too late, to me it felt a lot like Denzel Washington getting his first Best Actor Oscar for Training Day. Good. Glad he’s got it. But I’ll still never forgive the Academy for refusing to give him the same award years before for his career-defining performance in Malcolm X. Same goes for Beyonce. Several times over.

And so, I still question awards shows, a lot. Even when they get it right, they’re still wrong most of the time. And with the Oscars specifically, I think they often are a drag on the movie business itself, and have started promoting films most people don’t actually want to see (or in the case of The Brutalist, movies you can’t actually watch in most of the country).  

So with all this existential angst over awards shows, I pose all my questions and make all my arguments to my panelists on the show this week: Amanda Dobbins and Sean Fennesy. They’re the two hosts of one of my favorite movie podcasts: The Big Picture, from the Ringer Network. 

You’ll have to listen to see where they stand on my hot take, but I will share two tidbits from our conversation. First, they think the Oscars telecast could be better. And one of their suggestions? Elimination rounds. A film is taken out of the running for Best Picture every few minutes of the telecast, and then they have to give an interview talking about why they think they lost. (My fix was making everyone run their speeches by Academy editors before they get onstage after a win. There’s no reason people who talk *for a living* shouldn't have good words ready to go.)  

Listen to the episode to see how else we’d all fix the Oscars, hear us all talk way too long about The Brutalist, and let us tell you why Showtime at the Apollo may actually offer a way forward for the Oscars telecast.

We also talk about where the awards, or at least the Grammys, are headed thematically, with Kendrick Lamar’s big night last Sunday offering a roadmap to the Grammys future. While Beyonce’s Album of the Year win felt like too little, too late from the Recording Academy, Kendrick’s diss track “Not Like Us” winning both Record and Song of The Year may be a bigger sign of the Grammy’s growing progressivism. When I was a kid, record labels wouldn’t even formally release diss tracks. And now… 

Maybe there’s hope for awards shows after all. In the meantime, I’ll continue to argue about them. Check out this episode for more of my ranting (and my prediction on the future of the queer-coded blockbuster) and if you’re feeling so inclined, and write back: How would you fix awards shows? Or would you end them all together? I’m curious, and could talk about this stuff for days. 

Alright. Happy weekend. And happy awards season.

– Sam 

Check out the latest episodes of The Sam Sanders Show here. 

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