BEFORE we go any further: a confession. I have never won an award. I did get my cycling proficiency when I was 10, I have a bronze Duke of Edinburgh badge, and I’m pleased to say I passed my driving test second time. But as for winning awards, I have nothing to show at all and that may influence what I’m about to say. Maybe I’m bitter and resentful. Maybe.

Except that, despite never having won an award, I have been a judge of them a couple of times and what I learned isn’t pleasant. Like me, you may think awards can't really be based on an objective assessment, but it’s actually worse than that. Perhaps it’s time we re-thought the whole idea of “awards”. Perhaps it’s time we recognised the entire concept is deeply problematic.

I can think of people who might agree with me. Pop star The Weeknd for example, who's confirmed he will not submit his work to The Grammys after criticising its “secret committees”. Or former colleagues of Noel Clarke who saw him being given a Bafta. Or any of the actors, writers, and so on, who feel they have been overlooked because of their opinions, or background, or gender.

The central issue, really, is the entire idea that one small group of humans can or should, make a judgement about who is the best among another group of humans. All of us come with a set of prejudices and we tend to approve of work that conforms to those prejudices and struggle to appreciate work that runs counter to them. This is not a criticism really, it’s just the way humans work.

Trying to fix the prejudices can also cause more problems. You may remember the #OscarsSoWhite controversy when the awards were criticised for failing to nominate a person of colour in the acting categories. As a result, the Oscars and other ceremonies have consciously increased the number of nominees from diverse backgrounds. But doesn’t that leave us with a different version of the same problem? The motivations are good, but the judges are being influenced by the nominees’ background and who they are. It’s positive discrimination rather than negative.

The problem we have here is that it’s impossible to remove discrimination from the process which undermines the entire concept of awards. You can increase the size of the panels and make them as diverse as possible but that just leads to more and varied prejudices. You can also seek to ensure a certain number of nominees are LGBT, say, but positive prejudices can distort or conceal good work just as negative prejudices can.

I saw it myself when I was a judge in journalism awards. I cannot speak for the other judges, but it was a pretty unsatisfactory process. Quite often, I would like someone’s writing and the other judges would hate it, or the other way around, and I started to realise I liked someone’s writing because it was a bit like mine, or they had the same opinions as me. Other factors also came into play. Were there enough women? Did we have a good enough geographical spread? On the face of it, it was an attempt to deal with imbalance but all it did was introduce a different form of it.

In the end, the process left me disillusioned and I was unhappy with some of the decisions we made. It also left with me with a feeling that awards themselves are at fault. What they’re really about, mostly, is publicity and promoting a particular business: movies, books, journalism. They can also make quite a bit of money and aren’t really a reliable assessment of who or what is the best.

So, if I had the chance to speak to some of the people who’ve won awards, or haven’t, I’d tell them it doesn’t matter. If you win an award, you think you’re great (or don’t deserve it). If you don’t win one, you think you’re rubbish (or the judges are wrong). Either way, it’s a distortion of what’s really going on. Much better to get on with it and not compare yourself to others. Much better to be proud of never having won.

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