Anybody who says Australia doesn’t have fine cultural traditions obviously hasn’t logged onto Twitter during a Logies ceremony. For one night a year, the glitterati and the Twitterati join together and engage in the greatest national pastime; Logie-bashing. There were plenty of digs to be had this year, from some more disgraceful-than-average red carpet disgraces, to shocking and unexpected wins, to audio problems in the pointless international guest artist’s performance, to a lip-synching controversy that gave everybody the chance to get in on another time-honoured tradition; Kylie-bashing.
Over the next few days, as is the tradition, people will take a good, long, hard look at the Logies and ask how we can fix things, and what can be done to improve the integrity of the voting system. People will call for sweeping changes to television’s night of nights.
These are fair questions to ask. People should be asking, for example, why there are no comedy categories. Instead, they’re lumped together with “light entertainment”, which means that comedies are up against reality shows and talk shows (ABC’s Middle Class Bogan was up against The Voice). Surely there were enough quality comedies on TV last year to justify a category of its own (and Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell should have been nominated). There were definitely enough reality shows to justify their own category.
And some commentators have already come out batting against the voting system, which splits categories into “most outstanding” and “most popular”. It’s always been a bit of a joke that the popularity awards gain more kudos than the industry voted awards. When Asher Keddie won the Silver Logie for Most Popular Actress in 2011, she joked in her acceptance speech: “You’ve no idea how happy I am that I’m the most loved. The most popular. That’s so cool, I don’t care if I’m good or not.”
But the Logie Awards aren’t alone in their category and voting controversies. If you look to Hollywood, the Golden Globes allow film studios to submit dramas in comedy categories to put them up against “lighter” competition, and the voting committee, the Hollywood Foreign Press, has less than 100 members, made up of journalists, as well as real-estate agents, car salesmen and hairdressers, according to Peter Howell. The Oscars have similarly elastic categories (Jennifer Hudson was submitted for, and won, Best Supporting Actress for Dreamgirls, despite the fact that she was clearly in the leading role) and have become notorious for the amount of money studios will spend to push their films to voters. In 1998, Miramax successfully spent $5 million on their campaign for Shakespeare in Love.
A little closer to home, our “cinema and television arts” awards, the AACTAs, drew their fair share of criticism for kowtowing to Hollywood by awarding Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby 13 gongs, including one for Hollywood megastar Leonardo DiCaprio, as Best Actor. Our national performing arts awards, The Helpmanns, come with controversy every year. The industry voters aren’t required to have seen all the nominees in the categories they vote in, which means those based in more populous cities, and those with tours or longer runs, are instantly more likely to win.
All of our biggest awards shows are essentially marketing events. Their primary purpose is to build up an image around entire industries, and recognising the “best of the best” is secondary. That’s not to diminish the achievements of those who win, but if you’re looking for integrity, you probably shouldn’t look to any entertainment industry awards shows.
At least the Logies come with a little transparency. In the lead-up to the ceremony, viewers are coaxed with promo after promo on their screens, on the radio and on social media. At least we get to see the campaigning that would usually go on behind closed doors, and we can clearly recognise the imbalances in terms of exposure.
Decades ago, when the majority of voting happened via the TV Week paper-based voting system, networks were known for faking form after form in an attempt to get a gong (Daily Review’s own editor, Ray Gill, remembers, early on in his career, working in publicity, filling out hundreds of forms alongside a certain Comedy Company actor). We know it’s a shameless popularity contest that could be affected by any number of irrelevant factors. Only at the Logies could Scott Cam, a tradie-cum-presenter, who happened to stumble onto a high-rating show, win the highest honour in an entire industry. I can’t judge Cam’s performance on The Block as I’ve only watched half an episode, but I’ve never got the impression that he was a major draw-card for the program. But The Block did rate consistently higher than the programs all his competitors appeared on. Is anybody genuinely surprised?
Nobody is looking to the Logies for the best in Australian television. So let’s just let it be what it is; a chance for the B- and C-list to frock up, have a few bevvies and struggle to make it through breakfast television the next day. We love to send up the Logies. We loved when Joan Rivers ripped into the Awards ceremony in 2006. Wouldn’t we all be disappointed if they were dignified?
They do end up honouring some worthy work and celebrating an industry that continues to grow, refine itself, and offer more to broader audiences. But nobody’s naïve enough to think that’s what they’re actually about.