If you run with the pack, you need not bark but wag your tail you must. Russian proverb. For 23 years, I was literary editor, and later also film critic, of the London Evening Standard. A dreamy job — getting paid well to read books and watch movies and then tell people what I thought about them? It definitely beat working on a battery chicken farm, which is what I had done for my gap year.
To every ointment, a fly, though. It was a requirement of my role to appear suitably excited about prizes. The Booker Prize, the Whitbread Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. And then, later, the Oscars, the Baftas, the Golden Globes. Round and round they came, year after year. For the first five years or so, they were a novelty and I was genuinely curious about them, actually invested in who won and who lost. They seemed important, even.
It is the great charm of books and films that they are not really events. Prizes exist to correct this slack independence. They turn works of art into events, competitive battles in specific times and places. News, in other words: unreliably predictable, then urgently reportable, calling for sage analysis afterwards. So I obliged. Every time the Oscars came around, there were noms to be totted up, victories to be cheered, snubs to be deplored or snarkily relished. All of this I did, despite having previously in civilian life been one of those laggards who was not entirely clear whether the Academy Awards and the Oscars were one and the same or not.
There was no obligation, of course, to be only respectful. It was fine also to mock, to ridicule, to parody — in fact, encouraged, as an essential aid to general noise creation. For fame is a shuttlecock, it must be struck at both ends, as Johnson said.
What you can’t say
For several years, I got to announce, pre-Oscars, my own preposterous awards in the paper: Most German Sex Act (in Toni Erdmann, don’t ask), Top Bird (avian, that is: faithful seagull Sully in the shark movie, The Shallows). The film critic of The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw, a former Standard colleague, continues quite simply to announce his own awards each year, the Braddies, although whether this is a joke or not remains unclear.
The Oscars: an absurdity, a humiliation of the art they ostensibly elevate
What was not allowed, for anyone still hoping for employment in the business, was to declare prizes per se, whether conferred by a panel of supposed experts, like the Booker, or distributed within the trade, like the Oscars, an absurdity, a humiliation of the art they ostensibly elevate. The French poet Baudelaire was braver. Prizes, he said, demean those who accept them. In 1851, responding to the creation of a prize to encourage virtuous plays and novels, he wrote: “Prizes bring bad luck. Academic prizes, prizes for virtue, decorations, all these inventions of the devil encourage hypocrisy, and freeze the spontaneous upsurge of a free heart.”
You can’t say fairer than that, although the great Austrian nihilist Thomas Bernhard tried. In My Prizes: An Accounting, published posthumously, he sarcastically described winning nine major awards and taking the cash. “I despised the people who were giving the prizes but I didn’t strictly refuse the prizes themselves. It was all offensive but I found myself the most offensive of all.”
The modern era of prizes can be blamed on the will of Alfred Nobel. The industrialist and inventor of dynamite allegedly read a premature obituary of himself in a French paper headed “the merchant of death is dead” and decided he needed a better legacy. So in 1896 he left 96 per cent of his fortune to establish five prizes to be given to those who had conferred “the greatest benefit on mankind” in different fields. It is the definitive example of prizes being used to convert wealth into prestige — the creation of cultural capital for all involved, as the French theorist Pierre Bourdieu put it — widely emulated since.
My sorry part in this
It seems Donald Trump will do anything he can to win the Nobel Peace Prize, at whatever cost to the world
The most prestigious prize of all, supposedly, is the Peace Prize, for fraternity between nations, reduction in standing armies and the promotion of peace conferences. It was awarded to Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres but never to Gandhi. Now it seems Donald Trump craves this last bauble so much, he will do anything he can that he thinks will help him win it, at whatever cost to the world.
The Literature Prize, which has a similarly barmy specification of “the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction”, has got it wrong to the most extraordinary extent. Numerous forgotten nonentities, many of them Swedish, have been honoured, while those who failed to win (snubbed!) include Leo Tolstoy, Henry James, Anton Chekhov, Mark Twain, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov — and, more forgivably, Graham Greene, despite being nominated 26 times.
The Oscars have not done much better in anticipating the verdict of posterity. Alfred Hitchcock, nominated five times, never won for best director. Cary Grant, twice nominated, was never best actor. Nor did Greta Garbo win. Or Tom Cruise, come to that. So who is your money on this weekend? The Brutalist or Anora? Mikey Madison or Demi Moore? Remember Green Book? Few do.
But I am a fine one to talk. My own tiny excursion into the world of prize judging, the Man Booker of 2005, resulted in The Sea by John Banville winning, rather than the masterpiece Never Let Me Go. The latter has since sold millions, with its author, Kazuo Ishiguro, receiving the Nobel, for what it is worth. For weeks I cringed whenever I saw anybody on the Tube valiantly attempting The Sea.
So that’s prizes for you, I can now say. Farewell to them. Like sweets, good for kids, though.
David Sexton was Literary Editor of the London Evening Standard from 1997 to 2020. In 2014, he won the prize for critic of the year at the Society of Editors Press Awards
