His eyes are on the prizes

JAMES F. ENGLISH is the author of “The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value.” Published recently by Harvard University Press, the book includes everything from Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of cultural capital -- an application of the laws of supply and demand to the intangible world of knowledge and status -- to the meaning of the myriad awards won by Michael Jackson. The New Yorker’s Louis Menand called the book an ingenious analysis of the history and social function of cultural prizes and awards, concluding that we need them so we can complain about how stupid they are.

On that note, English begins the book by describing our collective ambivalence about cultural prizes: our suspicion that these awards are both important but also somehow debasing in their equation of the artist with the boxer or discus-thrower.

On the eve of the Academy Awards, we spoke to English, a literary scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Cultural prizes go back at least as far as ancient Athens. Have the mixed feelings, the sense that artistic awards are the corruption of something pure and noble, gone all the way back too?

Yeah, absolutely. We don’t know that much about the Attic Prizes, but we do know they had elaborate systems involving choosing names out of urns, and a redundancy of judges where they threw out half the ballots, and so on. The sense that there was a scandal brewing underneath the surface -- that was built into the actual apparatus of judging.

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You write that the vast literature of mockery and derision with regard to prizes must be seen as an integral part of the prize frenzy itself. What do you mean by that?

Prizes thrive on publicity -- and the most sure way for them to generate publicity is to create a sense of scandal and outrage. People who express outrage over the selections, or denounce the judges as fools and charlatans, are giving the prize the kind of attention in the media that prizes really want and need.

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What can we tell about the motion picture academy’s values by looking at the Academy Awards?

The academy is stuck with the awards, in a way -- the membership might not be down with all the values coded into the awards. But one thing that’s really clear is that these awards honor individual achievement. And the cinema is a very collective and collaborative business: Movies are made by teams of people, and the Academy Awards uphold the mythology of the great individual.

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What’s the role of the secondary awards, the Golden Globes and so on?

I think they threaten it. The problem is now, we have so many awards shows, with tastes and rules of eligibility all so close to the Academy Awards’, that they duplicate, to an extraordinary extent, the academy itself.

Another way of looking at it: If you look at the oddsmakers, the bookmakers, it used to be that the odds were fairly long, even on the favorites.

Now if you look at the favorites, it’s such a done deal. There’s no way anything but “Brokeback Mountain” will win best picture. And there’s just no way the money’s wrong on Philip Seymour Hoffman [from “Capote”] as best actor. They’re gonna win every prize on the way up.

It’s not like sports where you really don’t know. The money doesn’t lie. It’s already over.

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What’s the role of the press and media in all this? Have we created this monster?

Journalism found a use for prizes, especially for prizes in areas of art that don’t normally make very good copy. Prizes are competitive and produce an annual winner, like a sports championship -- and that’s far more newsworthy or reportable than most of what goes on in, say, poetry writing. A lot of what has happened in the arts over the last 100 years actually involved a convergence of art with sport, and the rise of modern journalism had much to do with this convergence. It’s no coincidence that the Venice Biennale, the modern Olympics and the Nobel Prizes all emerged at precisely the same moment in the 1890s, around the same time that professional soccer was becoming truly a world sport.

Awards offer an extremely useful shorthand and shortcut -- to keep us from coming up with a real evaluative language.

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You write in your book that a strictly cynical or mocking attitude is inadequate. After all you’ve said, I’ve got to ask, why not?

If you can’t see the two-sidedness of this coin, at all times, you’re missing the true function and effects. You’re not understanding the way this economy works. It’s both an embarrassment, a trick, a kind of fakery, and a real symbolic currency we all believe in enough to keep afloat. And the strictly cynical or mocking approach fails to take into account one’s own complicity in this.

It’s like you’re saying, “I’ve transcended this.” That’s not the case. It’s not transcendable.

-- Scott Timberg