Awards as tournaments rituals: case studies of Grammy Award, Academy Award and Red Dot Design Award

1. Introduction

Awards are a means to honor the people and the products that best represent high-valued accomplishments, which are symbolic capitals of the winners (Simonton, 2011). Among all the awards in creative industries, Grammy Award and Academy Award are two best-known awards through award television shows. These two awards are distinguished from other awards of creative industries by three unique features—separation of nomination and award ceremony, celebrity visibility and political correctness of nomination. However, they also demonstrate the ‘tournament rituals’ theory (Anand & Watson, 2004). This essay argues that awards are ‘situated performances’ with tournaments of values of symbol, culture, economy and social network. It will begin with analyzing the two-fold award process, political correctness issue and celebrity visibility in award television shows with cases of Grammy Award and Academy Award. Follows the illustration of the awards as tournament rituals theory by comparing Grammy Award and Red Dot Design Award.

2. Separation of nomination and award ceremony, celebrity visibility and political correctness in award television shows: Grammy Award and Academy Award

Grammy Award is regarded as the top honor of musicians around the world while the Academy Award is considered as the climax of film industry practitioners’ career. Since music industry and film industry are highly mass marketized, Grammy Award and Academy Award generate more public interest than other professional-oriented awards in creative industries like product design industry. Therefore, television programs broadcasting Grammy Award and Academy Award can harvest a high audience rating. Meanwhile, Grammy Award and Academy Award expand reputation further via television shows. In 2020, Grammy Award television show was viewed by 18.7 million audiences, accounting for 0.2% of the world population (Tiantianchigua, 2020). In order to increase the audience number, Grammy Award and Academy Award adopt a two-step award presentation to extend the public discussion period. They announce nomination name list first while releasing awardees’ names on award ceremony afterwards. For instance, the 61st Grammy Award nomination name list was uncovered on December 7, 2018 while the award ceremony was held on February 10, 2019. The two-fold process led to 26.2 million interactions on social media (Jiemiannews, 2019).

Moreover, both Grammy Award and Academy Award add a pre-gala and a red-carpet show ahead of the award ceremony to have more media exposure. Only musical or movie celebrities who are invited by sponsors and award nominees are qualified to attend these two activities. They wear exaggerated costumes and makeup, usually designed by sponsors, to catch photographers’ and audiences’ eyes. Their fashion styles and interviews trigger heated discussions on media. For instance, Vogue published a digital collection of the best fashions of musicians’ from 1st to 60th Grammy Award red-carpet show (Biondi, 2019). On Google, there are about 120 million results of “Grammy fashion” on March 27, 2020 (Google, 2020). The more online discussions on the celebrities’ appearances and mishaps, the higher the chance to be noticed by the curious netizens their songs, films and the award ceremony have. On the other hand, the television channels can also attain high audience rating from celebrity visibility, since stars’ fans are inclined to watch the real-time show.

Political correctness of anti-racism and anti-gender-discrimination is also a concern of Grammy Award and Academy Award. Since they are watched by millions of audiences globally, the small proportions of non-white-Caucasian winner and female winner may be attached to more critiques. Take 60th Grammy Award as an example. There were merely eleven female winners among all the eighty-four categories (Zhang, 2018). From 2014 to 2018, female nominees only accounted for 9.3% of 899 nominees in total (Zhang, 2018). Therefore, 13,827 petitions against Grammy Award Chairperson Neil were collected criticizing male-domination in Grammy Award (Zhang, 2018). Celebrities like female singer P!nk and the deputy chairperson of Warner Bros. Department of Publish also signed the petition Wangyi entertainment, 2018). As for the Academy Award, no non-white-Caucasian was shortlisted in nominations of major performance categories in 88th Academy Award (Jinghua times, 2016). Movie star Will Smith and director Spike Lee criticized the racism of Academy Award (Jinghua times, 2016). These political correctness conflicts boosted discussions on these two awards—124 million results of ‘Oscar racism’ and 11.5 million results of ‘Grammy gender discrimination’ on Google (2020) on March 27, 2020. Feminist and anti-racist audiences, as well as fans of the ‘victim stars’ of these two awards, may stop watching award television shows. 31 million results of ‘boycott Oscar’ and 11.5 million results of ‘boycott Grammy’ can be found on Google (2020) on March 27, 2020. Hence, Neil stepped down in 2019 (Flanagan, 2018). The African-American Chairperson of Academy Award expressed her sorrow and promised to diversify the race background of jury members (Jinghua times, 2016). These efforts not only aim at building a fairer and diversified image of these two awards, but also they endeavor to make up for the loss of audience rating due to political incorrectness scandals.

In a nutshell, separation of nomination and award ceremony, celebrity visibility and political correctness play active roles in award television shows. These are methods of increasing audience rating of award television shows and promoting awards. Thus, television channels and awards committee can earn profits in this reciprocal relationship.

3. Awards as tournaments rituals: Grammy Award and Red Dot Design Award

Not as celebrated as Grammy Award, Red Dot Design Award as ‘Oscar of design’ mainly catches attention within the professional product design field. Without the audience rating driven like Grammy Award, Red Dot Design Award represents a more general image of awards of creative industries as ‘tournament rituals’ (Anand & Watson, 2004). Awards are ‘situated performances’ distributing prestige as symbolic value, reproducing the field for cultural value, promoting the field for economic value, facilitating practitioners’ network as social value, and ‘tournament of values’ (English, 2014; Anand & Watson, 2004).

According to the sensemaking thesis, rituals legitimate reality via offering symbolic models to the field (Anand & Watson, 2004). Awards’ ritual routines are programmed, so Anand and Watson (2004) named them ‘situated performances’. A picked venue, field practitioners witnessing the formal-dressing attendees’ grand entrances and exits, awardees’ and non-winners’ reactions and after parties. Instead of sticking to holding the Grammy Award ceremony in Staples Center, Red Dot Design Award ceremony took place in multiple selected venues relevant to design: Red Dot Design Museum in Singapore, Essen Aalto Theatre whose name shows honor to design master Aalto (PR Newswire, 2018). Although Red Dot Design Award also includes a red carpet for winners’ entrance, its primary function is to show respect to awardees by creating a spectacle atmosphere rather than a showy catwalk as Grammy Award (Nextorch, 2016). Immersed in the ritual sense, designers acknowledge the awardees on the stage. Thus, winners are given prestige as symbolic value from juries and peers’ recognition. Besides, Red Dot Design Award ceremony includes one to two performances between each award presentations (Nextorch, 2016). Without the task of increasing audience rating, the performances are not limited to popular songs like Grammy Award. For instance, Aalto Ballett Dance Group danced at the 61st Red Dot Design Award (Nextorch, 2016). The dance targeted at adjusting the pace of the award ceremony and delighting attendees.

Awards are field reproduction events by awarding eminent practitioners and work, indicating the evolution direction of the field and deal with conflicts among the field (Anand & Watson, 2004). Since award jury boards consist of recognized senior experts, the criteria of canonicity reflected by awardees are considered authoritative among the field. Hence, awards are expected to guarantee the quality and innovation of creative products and services. For instance, Red Dot Design Award juries comprise product design experts like Dr. Joseph Francis Wong, a previous Hong Kong Design Institute vice-principal (Red dot organization, 2020). The screening mechanics are the most strict in product design including innovation degree, functionality, durability, formal quality, ergonomics, symbolic and emotional content, product periphery, self-explanatory quality and ecological compatibility (Red dot organization, 2020). In the meantime, awards address tensions between practitioners and imply future trends of the field. For example, rock-and-roll was not appreciated by 1940s generations while it was popular among 1960s’ groups since its invention in 1950s (Anand & Watson, 2004). When Grammy Award juries instituted four awards for rock music in 1979, Grammy Award proposed a solution to the conflict of recognition of rock-and-roll genre (Anand & Watson, 2004). In 2017, the 59th Grammy Award revised its selection criteria to allow digital albums’ entries, which indicated the digitalization tendency of the music industry (Song, 2017).

Awards are also platforms branding awardees, canonic products, brands, organizations and industries to both their fields and the public. Caves (2000) pointed out that creative industries’ products and services have ‘nobody knows’ property which means that their success is unpredictable in the market. As mentioned in the above paragraph, awards define ‘best’ products, services and artists, audiences are likely to consume awardees’ works. Thus, awards help creative industries overcome ‘nobody knows’ property and boost awardees’ sales. In other words, symbolic value of awardees turns into economic value. Take Grammy Award as example, Best New Artist Winners sold nearly one million units yearly than nominees (Anand & Watson, 2004). Furthermore, award committees invite media to cover award ceremonies to promote the field to the public. Red Dot Design Awards are reported by PR Newswire, Yahoo Financial Hong Kong, Wangyi News, Sina Fashion and own websites of designers and studios (Baidu, 2020). Therefore, Red Dot Design Awards’ and awardees’ reputation goes beyond product design industry to outsiders.

Awards are occasions of social networking. Subsequent to the award ceremonies are after parties, where significant kinds of practitioners gather, enjoy drinks and make referrals to each other. For example, awardees, juries, design institute representatives and design enterprise delegates participated in the 61st Red Dot Design Award after party (Nextorch, 2016). During the after party, Asian and American designers seek cooperation opportunities with European design organizations to enter European markets (Nextorch, 2016). Apart from businesses, they congratulated on awardee and shared knowledge and latest design information with one another (Nextorch, 2016). Hence, horizontal bonds among the product design industry were built and reinforced with symbolic capital, social capital, cultural capital and economic capital exchanges.

In all, awards are tournament rituals containing situated performances with reputation allocation, field renewal with internal conflict solutions and future tendency predictions, public attention attractions and social resources conversions. Symbolic value, cultural value, economic value and social value circulate in awards which are field configuring events.

4. Conclusion

To conclude, awards are ‘tournament rituals’ with circuits of fame (symbolic value), field knowledge of both history and updated trends (cultural value), commercial chances (economic value) and connections (social value). Awards carry out situated performances of red carpet shows, award presentations and after parties. For award television shows like Grammy Award, pre-galas are added while nominations and award announcements are divided to fix more public attention through longer time media exposure. Celebrity gaze and political correctness are two hot topics on social media, engaging audiences into discussions, interactions and award television program watching. Grammy Award’s scandals like sexual discrimination and racism are protested against by stars, so their fans and feminists and anti-racists may turn their back to the award television shows.

Although some awards in creative industries do not have real-time broadcasting like Red Dot Design Award, they invite media to cover the award ceremony to gain public notice. At the same time, media exposures brand awardees and their products, services, organizations together with the field. Thus, fields attain broader influences and sales of awardees’ works bourgeon. Additionally, awards indicate the criteria of canonicity of the field as well as future directions. As for internal contradictions of field evolvement, their advocators reach a temporary harmony under jury boards’ decisions. Hence, fields evolve dynamically with adaptations to audiences’ preferences and aesthetics. Lastly, on after parties, awardees and company representatives assemble and exchange knowledge and social resources. Therefore, Awards as a nodal point of art and commerce create win-win relations between awardees and other practitioners, revitalizing the field in consonance of stakeholders.

References

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