Has the public lost interest in awards nights?

It wasn’t just the elections that distracted us from the awards season that just passed by practically unnoticed.

For the past three years or so, awards programs would just come and go — unlike in the past when viewers waited excitedly for the FAMAS, the Gawad Urian and the Star Awards.

And so what happened to the awards season? Why did the public lose interest in awards programs? Here are some of the reasons I can think of why people don’t care anymore about this annual movie event:

• The two major networks, GMA 7 and ABS-CBN, hardly sell airtime to independent TV producers. Last year, Channel 2 agreed to have a telecast of the Star Awards for Television, but aired the event after the Sunday lifestyle program Urban Zone, which usually ends at way past 1 a.m. By the time the awards show finished, it was already 3 a.m. of a Monday — when everyone was already in dreamland, in preparation for the week’s first day of work. It’s just too bad that Solar had taken over RPN-9, which used to air these awards programs. Maybe TV5 should consider including awards shows in its programming.

• The cable channels had eaten up into the pie and divided audience share. In the ‘80s — before the advent of cable TV, special events were the only interesting features on TV late Saturday evenings. But given such competition, awards programs have to be extremely interesting for viewers to stay tuned to it. And it would help if it is aired in a major network — at least a couple of hours before midnight and not when everyone had already fallen asleep to get some strength to hear the early Sunday Mass.

• The load of commercials in awards programs kept viewers away. However, I cannot even call producers of awards shows greedy because these productions are expensive to mount. Believe me — it is so much cheaper and less complicated to produce an indie movie. Producers, therefore, need to recover their investment by putting in a lot of advertisements. In some cases, the producer can even lose money after all that headache.

• Indie actors don’t make interesting watch on the red carpet. Actors from independent films may have more talent, but they can never be as glamorous as the stars from mainstream cinema who get regular exposure on television and will always be more popular and exciting.

• It’s so difficult to invite big-name stars to awards shows. If ever they accept an invitation, some of them will even charge the cost of their gown and makeup to production and that’s to the tune of no lower than P30,000. Besides, everyone seems so busy these days doing soaps. A lot of them also skip awards programs for fear that they’ll end up in Startalkís Tigbakan, which critiques the outfits of these stars on the red carpet.

• Awards programs are dime a dozen. From the ‘50s to the ‘70s, everyone tried to get a seat at the FAMAS awards night because it was the movie event of the year. Then came the Gawad Urian, the Catholic Mass Media Awards, much later, the Film Academy Awards and toward the mid-‘80s — the Star Awards for Movies of the Philippine Movie Press Club (PMPC). Unfortunately, there came an organizational problem within the PMPC and this resulted in the creation of the splinter group Entertainment Press Society, which now hands out the Golden Screen Awards. Why, even the FAMAS couldn’t get its act together either. There was a time when a breakaway group tried to revive the Maria Clara Awards. And then there are those endless awards given by academicians and students from various universities. Today, the public is so confused and doesn’t know anymore which body to believe and determine which list of winners is the most credible. At this point, when the market is so saturated and awards programs are starting to come out of their ears, people don’t seem to care at all. It’s the classic case of overkill and now the awards season is dead.