Grammys, Oscars, Golden Globes, the list of awards shows our favorite celebs attend goes on and on. They win awards for anything ranging from best animated film to best lead actor in a musical. While all these artists obviously work hard on their craft, people may wonder if the awards are fair.

All of the awards shows are scored differently. For example, in The Oscars (The Academy Awards) nominees are voted on by members of The Academy and anyone who has ever been nominated is a part of it. The Academy is broken up into branches for actors, directors and so on.

The nominees are selected by the people of the specific category. Actors vote for best actor nominees and directors vote for best director nominees. For categories like best picture, all of the 7,000 members of The Academy get to vote.

According to The Economist, an “alternative vote system” is used to count nominations and determine the winner. Both the nomination and voting processes are long and complicated.

People think that award ceremonies like the Oscars are rigged, biased or unfair and that there is a formula to winning using statistics. For example, according to Business Insider, 93 percent of best picture winners are dramas.

People also believe the awards are rigged toward white people. There isn’t much diversity in who is awarded.

While this is true, most of the people who win are white, this is slowly beginning to change. At the 2020 Oscars, Parasite, an all-Korean film, won four Oscars including best picture, which is the top honor.

We can never truly know if the award shows are rigged for sure unless we are behind the scenes of choosing the winner, but they are most likely not.

Acting and music is subjective and the best actress for one person may be not so great for another person. There are different ways people can be great actors in how they portray a character and everyone’s criteria on who deserves an award is different.
It is also difficult to determine what makes something qualify as the best picture. Is it the story, the acting, the depth of the characters, the editing or the costumes?

The process to determine the winners of each specific category is complicated and unique. To make things more clear to the general public, The Academy should put the specific qualifications for all of the awards on their website. In addition, they could explain the process of how winners are chosen to help people better understand how the entire process works.

With art being so subjective it doesn’t matter if certain people think it deserves an award. Watching award shows should just be fun way to see celebs the highlights of people’s favorite movies, TV and music of the year.