Present Tense:This morning you will have opened your papers to find pictures from last night's Meteor music awards. They will be largely the same as last year's pictures, but you might glance through them anyway just to give your eyes some exercise.
There, you will find a minor celebrity will have worn a dress of subatomic size. There will be musicians who are only marginally more famous than their fans. There will be one real star looking somewhat irritated at how his agent landed him this gig.
This will mark the beginning of the Irish awards season, to be closely followed by tomorrow night's Ifta awards. Together, they will serve as a reminder that the problem with some Irish awards - namely those that ape the King Kongs that are the Oscars or the Grammys - is how, while they aim to put the spotlight on an industry, they illuminate only the shallowness.
Not too many years ago, I was a judge in one of the television categories for the Ifta awards. The entries were, on the whole, so ordinary that it was baffling how the production companies in question could feel they represented work worthy of assessment for a major award.
For me, in truth, there was one clear winner, and the rest of the shortlist might as well have been there only to give a few others a night out.
You get the sense with the Iftas, however, that every year is an exercise in padding. Its somewhat loose entry requirements were highlighted by Donald Clarke in yesterday's Ticket, when he observed that Anne-Marie Duff's inclusion in the list of best supporting actresses was interesting, given that she was born and raised in London.
He also questioned the quality of the nominees and winners, to which I will add the fact that Paddy Breathnach's horror flick Shrooms was greeted with little enthusiasm elsewhere (Variety: "OK vid fodder with few real scares and not an ounce of originality"), but is up for Best Picture here.
This week, the novelist Zadie Smith earned a few column inches for her remarks about literary prizes. For starters, she was so unimpressed with the short stories sent to the competition she was judging that it was felt that no award should be given out this year.
"We could not find the greatness we'd hoped for," she wrote in a blog entry. "It's for this reason that we have decided not to give out the prize this year." That's quite admirable, in a way. It shows a refusal to slap someone on the back simply because it'll make one writer - and an entire industry - feel smug. You could imagine the hilarity at the Meteors if such an announcement had been made. Larry Mullen driving a Harley over his drum kit wouldn't have drowned out the sound of egos dropping.
Smith went further. "Most literary prizes are only nominally about literature," she wrote. "They are really about brand consolidation for beer companies, phone companies, coffee companies and even frozen food companies." As a past winner of both the Whitbread (now Costa) Prize and the Man Booker (that's three brands name-checked already) she was accused of being both ungrateful and hypocritical. She had, at least, referred to "most literary prizes", leaving the reader to decide which she approved of.
With the Man Booker, for instance, its importance does not come in the naming of a winner, a moment which is almost always contentious and divisive. Where it succeeds is through the longlist and shortlist, which allow books that might otherwise have been overlooked by the public to push themselves to the front of the shelf.
This has, arguably, justified its growth. But the success of its longlist has encouraged other awards to produce longlists, which turn into shortlists, which eventually produce winners. Because the awards industry is increasingly obsessed with column inches and visibility for both itself and its sponsors, this is an excellent PR trick. Because newspapers increasingly just need to fill space, they are willing accomplices.
Meanwhile, major awards spawn rebel awards whose very function is to offer an integrity perceived to have been lost - or never possessed - by the major industry awards. The British music industry produced the Mercury Prize as an alternative to the Brits. In Ireland, the Choice Music Prize (which has no sponsor) is the alternative to the Meteors.
And on they could go, until there are alternatives to the alternatives.
And they are all a godsend to news and picture editors, delivering as they do a potent combination of glamour, lists, entertainment, gossip and tiny dresses. Which in turn encourages bigger and bigger ceremonies, and more and more awards. And the real trick is to identify which of them have grown, because they are bulging with talent, and which are waddling up the red carpet, filled with padding.
