Trends of the week

The VMAs, Emmys, and the growing irrelevance of awards shows

MANILA, Philippines - Awards season returned this week, which meant that Twitter got to relive those halcyon days of the first quarter of the year when it had limitless weekly fodder. It also meant that it was time once again to confront the question of how awards shows still fit in a culture that is now dictated by millions of blabbermouths who issue their verdicts in 140-character screeds, and no longer by septuagenarian industry lifers who still probably think that the Internet is some sort of multi-level marketing scam.

The short answer: award shows mean little in the culture now. I remember a time when awards season served as my window to the zeitgeist, an annual, multi-category guide on good taste. That was also the time before the Internet.

In an era when awards shows mean less than ever before, the MTV Video Music Awards perhaps means the least, as MTV itself has been rendered meaningless by the Internet and, most thoroughly, by itself. The joke “they don’t show videos anymore” has been running for a decade, longer than YouTube has been pillaging their relevance. So for the umpteenth consecutive time, I followed an awards show exclusively on Twitter, because it’s at least 100 times more fun that way.

This year, I enjoyed reading my entire timeline riffing on the “Who the hell are these artists?” joke that was made by basically everyone over 15 years old. Comedian Ian Karmel tweeted: “I write for a pop culture TV show and I don’t know a bunch of people at the VMAs. I mean, I’m bad at my job, but still.” My favorite was when Ariana Grande came onstage and sportswriter Zach Harper tweeted: “I’m so out of the loop. This girl started Huffington Post?” Everyone knows who Beyoncé is, though, and so Twitter dissolved into vapor upon watching her show-stopping, mic-dropping medley performance. The jokes were gone and were quickly replaced by unintelligible gushing. All hail Queen Bey.

The Emmys feels more relevant than the MTV Awards, but only because it’s supposed to be the new “Golden Age of Television,” while today’s music is supposed to be garbage (trivia: “today’s music” has been garbage for four decades running now, according to generations of curmudgeon critics). Naturally, the winners in the most prestigious awards show for television at a time when the Internet goes crazy over shows for weeks at a time should be representative of this alleged “Golden Age.” Breaking Bad sweeping all its awards says a lot. Director Cary Fukunaga’s visceral noir True Detective — the Internet’s favorite TV series of the first quarter — was also honored. But what about Matthew McConaughey’s detective Rust Cohle, who single-handedly put social media under a three-month meme-making spell? Why are we still giving awards to Modern Family and Jim Parsons like it’s 2010? Was Orange is The New Black or Silicon Valley just an Internet fever dream? Was it just our online imagination, or did Game of Thrones really seize our collective consciousness?

While the VMAs, as an awards show, has been made redundant by the Internet, the Emmys doesn’t even seem to be aware it exists. This is not to say that award-giving jurors should judge based on popularity, but it does say a lot about how out of touch American TV and film “academies” are. We can clearly see TV’s impact on the public, whose TV-stimulated creative juices are all over social media. Every day is their awards show. They obviously have very little in common with the geezers at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and yet, they still pay attention when the red carpet is rolled out. Why? Because of all the jokes, both on stage and online.

So how do awards shows still fit in the culture today? The long answer: they are still relevant as the butt of a running joke, which is that they still pretend to be arbiters of a culture that has become so fragmented that they can no longer speak for those who actually reside in its infinite continents. These are the people who consume music and TV shows and digest them outwardly into memes, Tumblr pages, and Reddit threads. They are the culture. Any attempts at disproving their feelings through over-produced ceremony will only end up eternally comical.

Manny knows… basketball?

So boxing champion Manny Pacquiao finally got drafted into the PBA. Yes, a guy who has as much organized basketball experience as I do will be playing professional basketball now. This is actually happening. This isn’t a bad dream, in case you’re wondering. Neither is Pacquiao, the recording artist, or the Will Ferrell duet partner, or the game show host, or the legislator. But then again, maybe life is just one long dream we have yet to wake up from. I’m not sure anymore.

Hello Kitty is one big furry lie

Sanrio revealed this week that Hello Kitty — that iconic cartoon cat that looks like a cat, complete with whiskers and cat-like ears — is in fact not a cat, but a human girl whose name is Kitty White. While everyone’s still busy picking up pieces of their brain in the wake of this news, here’s something else to consider: maybe Sanrio isn’t really a company, but a third dimension that exists inside a dancing mushroom’s flying music box, who is also his best friend.