The Envelope has a fresh new look and more insightful awards coverage than ever before.
Barry Weiss, The Envelope
The Envelope has a fresh new look, and more insightful awards coverage than ever before. From a look at the “Hollywood” that is a hotbed for award-show rejections to a look at which awards are really worth celebrating, we try to figure out what is really worth watching in an awards season that sometimes seems to care about very little else.
This article contains spoilers to the new season of “The Real Housewives,” so if you want to avoid getting blindsided by the end of the show, stop reading now and get some popcorn.
There is never a season that you can predict without looking at the history of the awards season—or, for that matter, the history of the awards show itself. It can be daunting to try to predict what will happen when the year’s ceremonies get underway. After all, no matter what year an awards season is, there were always the same two or three or eight, and often the same four or five, of winners. It is an easy thing to become complacent with the way awards season works as we watch previous years’ nominees.
This is not to say that we do not pay attention to the history of winners. We do, because it can teach us something, and it can keep us from thinking that the show is “just like previous years”—as we are constantly reminded.
We begin our history lesson with the 2016 Oscars, which could easily be the most overrated broadcast event to have ever happened in the history of Hollywood. There was no talk of whether the most awarded film of the year was “The Shape of Water” or “Moonlight.” There was no talk of whether the most acclaimed film of the year was the first film this year on time—it was either “Moonlight” or “Dunkirk.” In some ways, the fact that “Moonlight” was named Best Picture was a good thing, since it forced everyone else to be better. But that was not the most important thing. What was truly significant about