Awards And Rewards

I make a point of never watching any kind of 'Awards Show' on the telly if I can help it: the Oscars, the BAFTAs, the Golden Globes, the Grammies (especially); you name them, I avoid them. But it was difficult to miss the major cock-up at last night's Oscars since it was the lead on all the news channels.

Even the highly edited bit I saw was excruciatingly embarrassing, so I can only think it must have been misery to sit through the whole thing (I mean the cock-up, not the show in general, though I suspect I'd have felt at least mildly embarrassed by most of what went on screen.) And now I'm wondering which poor soul is going to get the blame for the mess with the envelopes. I reckon it will be someone pretty low in the pecking order.

But I must say it struck me that there's a pretty obvious lesson in all this, especially for anyone who gets on a stage to perform. The real incongruity in it all was the fact that an utterly trivial bit of a mess, which had its funny side, and did no real harm to anyone, got so much coverage in the media. None of this really mattered or matters in the slightest. And that's what you need to keep in mind before you step on a stage to perform: you do your damnedest to get it right but you laugh it off if it goes wrong - as surely one day it will. Nobody got hurt physically, nobody died (except probably an ego or two, and good riddance to them.) 

The rewards for making good movies lie in the fact that they're good movies. (Oh, and the money, if you get any, doesn't do any harm.)