Cheapening the currency

Here come the Oscars. Even people who rarely visit the cinema can’t resist the world’s greatest awards ceremony. The collision of extremities makes it compulsive viewing. It’s a sort of morality play where the seven deadly sins, and their contrary virtues, are paraded in dumbshow. Greed, hope, vanity, despair, jubilation, pride, joy, envy and a dozen other maxed-out sentiments are let loose. Moderation is banned. Temperance, decency and any restraining impulse must take the night off so that excess and all its spiritual allies can frolic and cavort. We know what will happen. The winners, clutching the pepper pot-sized statue, will sob their gratitude to the world and claim that the gilded midget means more to them than all the money they will ever earn. Chances are, they’ll be telling the truth. The ceremony has one perfectly sincere objective. It brings kudos and publicity to the winners.

Creative people are peculiarly susceptible to the lure of prizes. The arts, unlike the law, medicine or academia, for example, have very few barriers to entry. Artists must struggle through their careers without the splendid official garb and honorific titles that magnify the egos of barristers, doctors and university dons. Awards ceremonies fill that deficit. They give artists something they crave, a visual denominator of status. It may be just a twist of worked copper or a laminated something-or-other but to the artist a prize is enormously significant. It’s a fact. That’s what matters. You can see it, you can touch it. So can other people. When you take it home you can pretend it means nothing to you by placing it in the downstairs loo (the one room that even a casual guest is likely to visit and thus accidentally glimpse the evidence of your achievement and of your ‘reluctance’ to display it publicly).