Awards Season!

We're well in to the awards season at the moment (we've had the Golden Globes and the Baftas and tonight, Wednesday, its the turn of the Brits), the big one however is the Oscars, held on Sunday night (Monday morning in the UK) in Hollywood. So why do we have awards ceremonies and why are they on our tellies?

Simple: they sell. The more nominations a film/pop star/actor/whatever gets the more PUBLICITY it gets. If it wins an award then it will get even more. This means we're more likely to hear about it and therefore more likely to spend money on the CD or seeing the film.



If Duffy wins British Breakthrough Act tonight does it mean she was the best newcomer (or was that the Ting Tings?)? No. It just means that she has been rewarded by the record industry for selling more CDs (4.5 million of 'em) than anyone else last year.

So what about the Oscars? Well, away from the big awards (expect Slumdog Millionaire to win a load - and rightly so) the one we should be interested in is Best Animated Feature. And the nominees are:

• Bolt
• Wall-E
• Kung-Fu Panda

So which should win? I reckon Wall-E should and will, at one point critics were suggesting it could win Best Film (Beauty and the Beast is the only animated film to get nominated for this,in 1992, it didn't win) but that never happened. I hope it does win as I thought it was the best thing I saw at the cinema all year (even better than Juno, and that's going some). But what do you think? I've put a poll up for the next week or so to say who you think should have won.

For more information on the Oscars go to: http://www.oscar.com/
and for the Brits, see here: http://www.brits.co.uk/

So, remember awards are all about INSTITUTION and raising the profile of a product, it's a way the INDUSTRY can help to SELL that product.