THE LOST ART OF AWARD SHOWS & CELEB INTRIGUE.

The small sense of authenticity we used to get from award shows is gone. I feel it has less to do with these shows and more to do with how much more access we have to stars. Since social media started giving us much more insight, it seems we don't need award shows or the chaos surrounding them because we acknowledge it's overwhelming. Just recently the whole debacle around Selena Gomez and Hailey Bieber had established businesses such as Target and many more picking sides. The impact a small alleged incident had, was blown out of proportion with many debating as well as dissecting the issue on Titkok.. It felt very dystopian to me that people with jobs and lives that are meant to be lived, are being put on pause to dissect what they assume to be alleged harassment from Hailey Bieber....the sense of reality around understanding we don’t know these people has completely gone.

I would go as far as to say that I feel as though people just don’t respect or admire celebrities like they used to. Concert etiquette is wayward, scattered, and chaotic with fans practically sexually harassing artists whilst they’re performing. This is so normalized to the point where most of us are desensitized to the 5-second video of a fan yelling mommy to an uncomfortable artist. It's incredibly inappropriate and strange but I feel it’s this comfortability people feel towards celebrities, that contributes to the factor of just seeing celebrities as an extended version of someone we know. Parasocial relationships are ruining the boundaries distinctively placed between us & them.

We also have this collective understanding that most things are very much scripted. Is it Cake or is it Real? Either way, we just aren’t falling for it anymore or tuning in anymore. Ratings for award shows have dramatically dropped, which is abysmal to me considering award shows used to be the most anticipated moments of the year.

We used to only have access to news about stars from magazines, hounding paparazzi, anonymous sources running to the press, or outlets such as Enews. But now it seems accounts on TikTok such as 'deuxmoi' that discuss alleged blind items are sources of news people rely on as they’re advertised as coming directly from a close source. The art of secrets coming out is what fuels blind items, when we were not supposed to know or see is precisely when we are most satisfied with celebrities.

We love to discuss pure "tea" simply because we weren’t ever supposed to know. Social media has ruined the illusion of exclusivity. Celebrities now tweet in response to allegations directly, which removes the spectacle around stars. I feel as though we never wanted this, we didn’t want to be close to stars. We simply wanted a look without it coming directly from them. Now we have much more access to star’s homes via Vogue's 21 questions with (notable person). It's as if they’re controlling the narrative and we don’t like this. When things go array and come to light in front of our eyes via award shows, this is what we love because it’s authentic.

The trashy 2000s celebrity status era is what we want. This is why whenever we talk about how Hollywood used to be we think back to this time. It’s when things were much more surface level, you knew who didn’t like one another because they simply stated this but nowadays everything is much more polished as well as serious. PR teams are constantly getting their coins polishing stars, to remove any shred of personality we may find around an upcoming star.

PR teams have always been around, I'm simply implying the image they’re attempting to sell has ruined the way we see stars now. So when a star is outspoken or goes against the grain it’s seen as outlandish. When things always used to be as such, which we can see via old award shows. We reminisce on these times because life was much simpler, we weren’t bombarded with pop culture at all corners of a small Blackberry phone. The past compared to now, where we all mostly have unnecessarily large iPhones overwhelming us with TikTok and reels at every given second, is why we wouldn’t even bother watching award shows.

We want exclusivity, mystery, and the idea we're being left out of a big secret. Why would we watch award shows now when we could just wait for a quick 15-minute run down on YouTube? If you follow your favorite celebrity on social media, all you’d need to do is wait for a tweet confirming they won an award... We don’t need to sit down and watch an award show with a new boring celeb host, that lacks charisma whilst we are sitting at home dealing with real issues. Fame is simply an illusion that many of us feed into, to escape the harsh realities of the world. Most of us will never get close to living a day like Kylie Jenner and having her on Snapchat instills this in your mind always, which eventually turns into resentment. Why are we watching stars that have everything they want when we have nothing?

This is all polarising because as I stated previously, we used to wish and dream to have more insight. My point is that it’s a simple case of damned if you do damned if you don’t. With technology becoming more advanced this illusion of exclusivity is wavering. We are becoming more aware overall which makes it harder to watch things surrounding celebrities when all we see is celebrities. Credible news outlets are now being overshadowed by news blogs on social media, which are run by people who have not studied a day of Journalism or Media. We saw this massively with the Megan Thee Stallion and Tory Lanez trial. Outlets are being run by people lacking the knowledge of how you ethically report trials.

The Johnny Depp vs Amber heard trial is another example of this, with the trial being televised and dissected on social media we can already see an incredible difference, regarding ethics and the importance of forgetting personal biases and only reporting facts. Should it have been televised? Probably not but this did wonders for the engagement towards both parties. Why watch award shows when real traumatic events of a star’s life are being televised ?....

TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter have made it much easier for a random person to have the same amount of followers as anyone in Hollywood right now. We don’t have "Celebrities" anymore we just have people in the limelight they’ve obtained due to social media presence. Magazines & Reality TV have also been hit with the impact of social media and how we access surrounding stars.

Click to watch a compilation of chaotic and infamous events within pop culture at award shows by @Qualitea.