Australia, we need to talk about winning.
What is the deal with us and awards? Sports trophies, we love. Overseas gongs, fantastic. But the moment we try to hand out our own awards based on actual merit, we lose our collective marbles. It’s like we’re afraid the alien overlords will come down and declare us to be lacking modesty. Perhaps the Prime Minister knighted Prince Philip in the hope of being praised for his keen objective judgment. Set and match, Tony.
I don’t care if we start handing out an actual golden poppy, we need to start bigging-up ourselves. Giving our stars a rap. Identifying success as a good thing.
Working the red (well, green) carpet for TMNT late last year, I stood alongside a journalist as he was asked by star Will Arnett: What is the Australian equivalent of the Oscars? The weird part wasn’t that Arnett was hinting the soon-to-be-forgotten Turtles flick might be a contender. It was that the journalist’s response was, without pause, “the Logies.”
No. No it’s not. The Logies are Australia’s equivalent of the Emmys in opinion, the equivalent of the People’s Choice Awards in structure and the equivalent of the Golden Globes in terms of gathering stars to eat and drink (and drink, and drink) together in front of the cameras while we watch.
The Logies are also exclusively awards given out for television. Not, you know, film. And they are seemingly only tolerated by the population at large because they are so shamelessly tacky. Ask yourself this: Do you think a Logie actually represents an endorsement of quality?
Last week saw the now annual trilogy of Australian screen awards – the AACTA luncheon on Tuesday where they gave out the technical awards (the ones they don’t think are sexy), the AACTA Awards proper on Thursday (the ones they hope are sexy but suspect aren’t) and the AACTA International Awards on Saturday, which are sexy but also held in Los Angeles and given to foreign films.
These are our Oscars. Voted for by an Academy of screen industry professionals and obsessives. Yet discussion of the ceremony spirals either to the organisation’s acronym (which sounds unfortunately like “actor”), a conversation about whether they need to be held at all, or as a segue to kick the box office figures for domestic movies.
Last week we at least got a conspiracy, as the tied winners for Best Film (The Water Diviner and The Babadook) prompted some to suggest the Academy was just trying to curry favour with Russell Crowe and his industry heavyweight friends.
The thought that the voting was rigged is more fantastical than some of the plots nominated in the screenwriting awards, but then this is the creative industry. Nonetheless, if there was a reason to rig the voting surely it was to at least get people talking about the winners. Sort of.
This year Australia has two nominees for the Oscars, in Visual Effects and Sound. But Australians won literally scores of Academy Awards just last week.
Maybe if we tried really, really hard, we could all take a moment to just pretend for a moment that that is something we can all be proud of. Pretending is an actors trade after all. We could call it AACTing.
Let’s all AACT like we are proud of each and every AACTA winner. They deserve it, because they’re all really, really good.
