H
ARDLY ANYONE
would expect a sum-
mer blockbuster like
Avengers: Endgame
to win the 2020
Academy Award for best picture. But
at the Grammys, it will be no surprise if
another pop phenomenon, Lil Nas X’s
“Old Town Road,” gets record of the
year. And it will be a shock if other
chart-toppers like Billie Eilish, Ariana
Grande and Lizzo aren’t among the
Big Four nominees in November. Like-
wise, it’s difficult to imagine a Grammy
equivalent to the most memorable
recent Oscars rivalry — Moonlight vs.
La La Land in 2017, a showdown that
invested two relatively commercially
marginal works with outsize symbolism.
It would be as if last year’s album of
the year contest had come down to a
faceoff between, say, Kamasi Washing-
ton and The 1975.
The highest-profile American
awards shows in movies and music
are each determined by the votes of
working industry professionals. But in
recent years, the Grammys have leaned
toward reaffirming commercial suc-
cess, while “Oscar bait” has become
synonymous with prestige films that
don’t do blockbuster business. What
explains this populism gap?
Nearly every arts and entertainment
award struggles to balance mass
appeal and credentialed opinions,
to reflect both the cutting edge and
some form of consensus. Some rely
openly on the cognoscenti (Canada’s
critic-voted Polaris, Britain’s lumi-
nary-judged Mercury) while others are
driven by commercial success (Amer-
ican Music Awards, Billboard Music
Awards). The Oscars and Grammys, on
the other hand, are industry popularity
contests dressed up in the formalwear
of professional “academies” and pre-
sented to the public as revealed truths
— and the complexity of the voting
process can’t help but spark backlash.
Movies aim at more general audi-
ences, while even pop music tends to
be niche-oriented. When a Moonlight
or Roma gets an Oscar nod, film
lovers will go out of their way to catch
up with them. But music’s diverse
demographics make that a lot trickier.
Unlike movie stars, musicians are often
famous only within their genre — recall
when “Who is Arcade Fire?” became
a meme after The Suburbs snagged
album of the year in 2011. The music
business is more spread out geograph-
ically, too — Nashville has quite a dif-
ferent culture than Los Angeles or New
York, let alone Atlanta — which is why
the major category winners are often
well-known enough to be recognized
outside their genres.
Meanwhile, both academies share
a strong interest in ratings. But while
the Oscars are an international event
— no matter the nominees, viewers
will tune in to watch movie stars in
gowns and tuxes making speeches —
the Grammys depend more on star
performances, which in turn often
depend on nominations. If those lists
are too unfamiliar to the public, ratings
slide. And as recent history has proved,
music fans are more likely to take last-
ing offense if their favorites are slighted
— see the uproar around the absences
of Lorde and Ariana Grande from the
last two Grammy telecasts because of
disagreements with producers.
In truth, the Grammys have for
decades often produced results that
seemed out of step with the most
important developments in popular
culture — ignoring rock through much
of the ’60s in favor of Frank Sinatra and
Las Vegas lounge comedy, for instance,
or being slow to recognize the rise of
alternative rock and, especially, hip-hop
through the ’90s and into the 2000s.
Around that time, The Recording
Academy instituted a set of behind-
closed-doors review committees, first
genre-specific and later for the biggest
categories, to adjust nominee lists that
fell too far out of touch. Even after that,
there were awkward moments, like
Herbie Hancock’s 2008 album of the
year win for a little-heard set of Joni
Mitchell covers, which beat genera-
tion-defining records from Kanye West
and Amy Winehouse. Under stress first
from the more youth-oriented MTV
Video Music Awards (for many years
better at generating conversation, if
not consensus), and then from loud
callouts online, the Grammys have
become more nimbly reflective of the
pop zeitgeist.
The internal mechanisms involved
are a bit opaque, but publicly the
academy has undertaken recruiting a
younger, more diverse membership.
Still, it’s dogged by the fact that most
voters are older, whiter and more male
than today’s most vital artists and
their fans — though perhaps not as
different from the likewise older-skew-
ing audience for broadcast TV than the
impression that the most active online
critics convey. The Grammy-nominee
lists today more accurately reflect the
state of 21st-century pop, but women
are often underrepresented, and black
hip-hop and R&B artists still seldom
bring home the major awards. Recent-
ly, the likes of West, Beyoncé, Jay-Z
and Frank Ocean have stopped even
showing up. (The question remains
whether incoming academy president
Deborah Dugan will be able to help
change any of this.)
As broadcast viewership has slowly
eroded, the Oscars too have come
to consider whether more populism
might be the remedy. Last year, the film
academy proposed a new outstanding
achievement in popular film award, but
backed off after complaints that it was
a patronizing and ghettoizing gesture
— it would, for example, have taken the
groundbreaking Black Panther out of
direct competition with more standard
Oscar fare. (Still, it did not win.)
This is where the Grammys’
populism shows its strength: Though
connoisseurs might wish smaller gems
could get more recognition, it’s no less-
er ambition to make works of art that
combine quality with hitting a wide-
spread cultural nerve. Arguably, that’s
the special superpower of American
popular music. Its vitality has always
sprung from the ground-level meetings
and clashes of cultures that make
up the nation. Rhythms, harmonies,
gestures and symbols rebound off each
other across genres and up and down
the charts. When the people handing
out the prizes listen for those echoes
and overtones, what they put down in
the record books will be more than the
ups-and-downs of a cultural industry,
but something closer to the story of the
culture itself.
THE POPULISM GAP
The Oscars prioritize prestige, but the Grammys lately
have rewarded commercial success — which may ultimately
highlight what makes music singular in the first place
BY CARL WILSON
Clockwise from top:
Arcade Fire’s Win
Butler, Lizzo, Eilish,
Lil Nas X and Hancock.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ISRAEL G. VARGAS SEPTEMBER 21, 2019 • WWW.BILLBOARD.COM 143
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