What are awards for?

Awards year in, year out and award-giving bodies are dime-a-dozen in this country.

​In film awards alone, there are more than ten and still counting.

That’s quite a sum.

Famas. Urian. YCC. Star. Pasado. Gawad Tanglaw. MMFF. Cinemalaya. Cinepanalo. QC Film Festival. Sinag Maynila. Eddys. Luna.

There are other awards rites being done in schools all over the archipelago like the annual Gandingan Awards of UP.

De La Salle and Ateneo also have awarding ceremonies on local films.

For excellence in TV broadcast, there are also enough givers, many of them being carried out by the same organizations mentioned above.

Multimedia awards like socmed digital accounts are also available.

Let us focus, though, on movie and television awards.

​While there are trophy and plaque overruns, may we ask what is really the purpose of awards?

​Basically, recognition for the efforts of the creatives and technical people, right?

Their relevance?

For me, they are incentives to perform well in a given task the next time around.       ​

First and foremost, though, awards must stir the public consciousness.

They must serve as a harbinger in critical thinking or catalyst of change from bad to good in the social condition of the fans, moviegoers or televiewers (read: citizens).

Awards given to winners must not only be validations of, for instance, an actress or an actor, knowing too well how to induce their tear glands properly or how they manage their acting chops but the motivation must be logical and socially verifiable.

A film, in any length, and a TV show in any genre, are society.

Although they are mostly creatively woven from the stretch of the imagination except even the so-called documentary dramas are situated in a particular time and setting including supernatural or sci-fi and other unreal or unique adventures, they are derived from a particular society.

Therefore, the struggles must be socially veritable.

In the end, emancipation from social evils must be one of the main objectives in handing out awards.

​The totality of a film or a TV program must be liberating to the shared experiences of the audience.

Their form and content must be complementary with each other.

​As a whole, an award, to be more-timely, must seek to discover truth, to serve justice, to fight oppression in and out of the box.

These criteria are just icing on the cake.

There are more parameters and yardsticks grounded on the social realities of daily lives of the quotidian.