Tybout: Awards ceremony lacks unifying element

I’ll give this to the 2010 Oscar hype: when the right people win, it makes the victory… I’ll give this to the 2010 Oscar hype: when the right people win, it makes the victory that much sweeter — almost sweet enough, in fact, to forget you’ve just wasted three and a half hours of your life on a mostly pointless awards ceremony.

Once again, the Academy Awards strived to be more than an awards ceremony — it was a struggle of blockbusters against independents, popular versus critical taste, money versus art. And in almost every category, it seemed the latter trumped the former, thanks largely to “The Hurt Locker,” the lowest-grossing Best Picture award winner of all time, which mopped the floor with its six awards.

In fact, despite my deeply entrenched Oscar cynicism, a surprising number of Oscars were given to those who, in my opinion, actually deserved them. Jeff Bridges did a marvelous job in “Crazy Heart.” Christoph Waltz  — who won for his supporting role in “Inglorious Basterds”  — was a badass of the highest order. And if there’s ever a supporting role that begs reward, it’s Mo’Nique’s stunning performance in “Precious.”

Of course, awards shows will never completely align with our personal tastes. For my part, I was pulling for “Inglourious Basterds” or “Up in the Air” to win Best Picture. And the fact that “The Hurt Locker,” while undoubtedly a fine film, beat “Inglourious Basterds” for Best Original Screenplay irked me a bit. But, at least for now, the tastes of the Academy seem to have improved.

Unfortunately, the more crippling problem of the Oscars remains: it’s still very long and very boring. By the time they finally got around to the categories of Best Actor and Actress after approximately three hours of babble, I resembled a freshman at a frat party: nearly passed out on a couch, just wanting it all to end.

So while the standards of the Academy might appear to have risen, the Oscars will probably remain a bloated, irrelevant endeavor. Kind of like the Grammys. Or any other awards ceremony, for that matter. The question, though, is whether it’s even possible for these ceremonies to be otherwise.

I used to think so. My ideal awards show would clock in at less than one hour. It would be hosted by someone who had zero tolerance for bullsh*t — Ving Rhames, maybe, or my former cross country coach. And if an award were ever given unjustly, Kanye would leap to the stage during the acceptance speech and inform the audience whom the real winner should be.

Gone, too, would be the Academy’s taste in music — Randy Newman already has enough awards. In its place would be “Best Use of Swear Words” or “Best Song That is Actually Kind of Catchy.”

Absurdity aside, I had a pretty specific image of a good awards show. And I’m sure many of my peers are the same way. But the problem is that all of our ideas are distinctly different. From the length of the ceremony to who should get what award, we lack a collective opinion on what “quality” is.

So it’s not just the Oscars that is bullsh*t. It’s everyone who seeks to rank one piece of art above another, to construct a supposedly infallible hierarchy. It’s like Hamlet said: “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Faced with this truth, we can do one of two things: we can scorn forever any and all awards ceremonies (personally, I think we could all do without the Grammys), or we can enjoy these ceremonies with a grain of salt. Yes, the judges rarely pick what we believe to be the right choice. Yes, “The Blind Side” shouldn’t even have been nominated. But who cares? The Oscars are still (sometimes) entertaining.

Still, would it kill to have Ving Rhames host a ceremony or two?