Awarding

Awards are a way of honoring or sometimes mocking particular people's notable achievements. A regularly given award can create a lasting institution that promotes its recipients, the award's own prestige, and the entire category of achievement which the award recognizes.

Creating An Award

Creating your own award to give out can be fun and easy.

Some awards are given for specific competitions.

Some awards are given for people's achievements in a particular category during a certain period.

Judging Criteria

Judging criteria must be clearly established for people to see the validiity of the choices.

Criteria for selecting judges is also important.

Award Structure

There are several ways to structure an award.

Categories

Most major award-giving institutions grant different awards for specific categories.

Ranking

The most common ranking system is First Place, Second Place and Third Place plus 3 Honorable Mentions or more Nominees. Some have a winner plus a short list and a long list of nominees.

Nominations

"The format for most major prizes conforms to the model of the Oscars. 'It's very much a case,' says English, 'of maintain perfect secrecy regarding the decision, assemble all the nominees, and roll the cameras in hope of catching bad behavior [eg. Kayne West], poor sportsmanship or just plain unhappiness.'" —The Guardian

Nominees may be notified of their consideration for an award.

Prizes

Awards usually come with prizes.

Prizes are usually monetary but some prizes have more orginal forms. For example, My Dream App's prize was the production of the Dream App concept by a team of experienced developers along with a financial share of the profits made by selling it.

Awarding Examples

The X Prize

The Nobel Prize

Wikipedian Barnstars

Wikipedia

Beauty Pageants & Playmate of the Year

My Dream App Design Contest

"There's the Oscars, the Golden Globes, the various Guild awards, the BAFTAs, the Emmies, the Peabodies, the Pultizers, the Booker Prize, The National Book Award, the Pen/Faulkner Award, the Orange Prize, the Nobels, the Turner Prize, the Eisners, the Harveys, the Ignatzes, the Mercuries, the Hugo, the Nebula, the Annies, and on and on. According to James English, author of The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Valueafter, it's become an "economy of cultural production and prestige," reaching "the point of a kind of cultural frenzy, with scarcely a day passing without the announcement of yet another newly founded prize." Are we getting carried away with the prizes?

There's no doubt there's some stake in winning or, at least, getting on the shortlist of some prizes. English says, "Prizes create symbolic value astonishingly quickly and easily, because they bring together economic power, social connections, academic expertise and celebrity and enable rather complex transactions to take place." Lionel Shriver winning the Orange Prize rocketed her career out of the doldrums and gave her all kind of attention paid to her words. But of course for one writer that gains recognition, there are many others struggling and competing for attention, "their cultural capital undervalued, their currency depreciating with each new artwork that passes unacknowledged in our economy of prestige." Of course the Orange Award was one award that was spun off in response to an earlier established, major award overlooking deserving artists.

And in that line, Jason Cowley also notes how the award mania is turning art into a sports mentality, with "its roster of winners and losers and its spectacles of competition" (Hello, Susan Lucci and Martin Scorsese). David Lodge's The Year of Henry James recounts the "pangs of professional envy and jealousy" he felt over Colm Toibin's biography of James winning the Impac prize and making the Booker shortlist, while his book on James, published at the same time, languished in obscurity. Lodge notes the schadenfreude he felt when Toibin didn't win the Booker. Cowly advises to take it in stride, as it's all become a game, something to enjoy complaining about.

Plastic.com