Someone please disrupt the Oscars

Here we are, once again, between the Grammys and this weekend’s Oscars — aka award season hell. These prizes are supposed to represent the pinnacle of popular artistic achievement, but their estrangement from public opinion is increasingly obvious. Even registering disappointment with their decisions has become pro forma; Kanye didn’t even have to snatch the mic from album-of-the-year winner Beck for everyone to know what he was trying to say. The lily-white Oscar nominations leave awards further removed from the public than ever. Is this really the best we can do?

From what we know about the people picking the winners, only a full-blown purge could give these ceremonies a new shot at legitimacy. A 2013 Los Angeles Times review of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences membership, which selects the Oscar winners, found it 93 percent white, 76 percent male and 63 years old on average. The Grammys’ most important winners are selected by a shadowy nominations review committee whose members are as unknown as they are unaccountable. In other words, America’s biggest media prizes are awarded by groups of people that could never win the public’s favor, so they get likable performers to open the envelopes and mouth the results. But not even Prince could announce Beck’s big award with a straight face. If the best we have to hope for is a knowing sneer, then it’s high time to ditch the Grammys, Oscars and the like.

But with the advent of social media — Twitter in particular — perhaps all is not lost. These events, when shared, are much more entertaining than they used to be. Finally, we don’t have to rely on the hosts, presenters or our couch mates for jokes and insights. The best part of the show happens not off screen but between screens. Even when they’re painfully wrong, award shows are fun to watch, and as illegitimate as they are, the situation hardly calls for an organized boycott. With no political or consumer moves left to make, are we stuck with the award status quo?

A few decades ago, MTV seized on a new opportunity with music videos, but this new content fell into an award black hole not covered by the Emmys, Grammys and Oscars. So in 1984 MTV went ahead and held its own show, the Video Music Awards. The VMAs in their heyday were beset by problems of the times — mostly drunk rock dudes yelling at each other. Mötley Crüe versus Guns n’ Roses in ’89, Poison versus Poison in ’91, Guns n’ Roses versus Nirvana in ’92, David Lee Roth versus Eddie Van Halen in ’96 and Courtney Love versus the whole damn charade in ’95 — it was as often as not a shit show. But the moon man statuettes came to stand for an experimental slacker ethic. The program has been mutable enough to include short-lived categories like artist website (awarded only once, in 1999, when the Red Hot Chili Peppers beat out Limp Bizkit, Sheryl Crow and Jennifer Lopez). At least MTV picked “Lady Marmalade” over U2’s “Beautiful Day,” and at least it was not the Grammys. But as MTV switched its focus from music videos to reality programming, the ceremony has lost much of its relevance.

The Internet has changed the way we produce and consume media far more than music videos ever did. Just ask the recording industry. Young people are flocking to user-created media, from Vine to Instagram to DatPiff to YouTube to SoundCloud. But award shows, with few exceptions, are geared to celebrate only content that has already cleared a few corporate hurdles. Labels are happy to comb the Internet for new acts, but celebrating unsigned artists is a step too far: It would improve their bargaining power and could (accurately) convey the idea that corporate tastemakers are playing catch-up with online platforms. When we look for artistic excellence worth recognizing, limiting ourselves to approved products clouds our vision. We end up awarding 30 percent of all best rap album Grammys in existence to Eminem.

The Nickelodeon Teen Choice Awards have created Vine and YouTube stars, but the openly rigged pseudo-competition (managers from the sponsor Teenasaurus Rox Inc. select winners from the top four vote getters) didn’t gel with the spirit of transparency; winners and losers alike joined the protest hashtag #TeensDontHaveAChoiceAwards. Usually child stars are easier to keep on message with regard to promotion, but YouTubers and Viners connect through open platforms with their viewers and are therefore less accountable to the particular brand of middlemen who currently run award shows. Whatever Nickelodeon thinks about it, the teens have spoken, and these new categories are here to stay.

Normally I’m not one to advocate market solutions, but where media award spectacles are concerned, anything is better than the status quo. If it takes Google or Twitter or Facebook or Snapchat or Apple or any of the other big content platforms realizing they could grab some free promotion to get a new award show, then so be it. There are plenty of content-related brands with the money and cultural cachet needed to get a first try at an annual ceremony — BuzzFeed, Vice, Vox, Gawker and a dozen other sites fighting to be fifth on the list. One of them will eventually take the plunge, and when it does, it will face significant pressure to improve on the overwhelmingly insular old-white-man-ness of the current regime. Celebrating outstanding artistic achievement is fun, and I think we can and will do it a whole lot better than this. Even if it’s James Franco live-annotating Kanye’s speech at the first annual Genius Awards, I’d tune in to see it.