Get ready for Awards Season
No matter where you happen to be on the calendar, you’re either in the thick of Awards Season or the storm of nominations that maintain its perpetual momentum – so, lest we forget, congratulations to the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and the Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh for their Grammy nominations.
At the start of December, however, Awards Season begins to absorb a special year-end clarity. We’re only a week away, for example, from the annual gatherings in Oslo and Stockholm of the Nobel Prize Laureates in six categories — peace, medicine, physics, chemistry, economics and literature. Remember, the Nobel Foundation invites you to join the festivities as they stream the Nobel Prize ceremonies and lectures.
Oh, you guys don’t do that? Hmph.
In the meantime, Merriam-Webster has named it’s Word of the Year — vaccine, the Sports Turf Managers Association has unveiled its 2021 Field of the Year winners (the Triple A Buffalo Bisons won for baseball and Texas Christian University for football), and before the month is out, this very publication will probably deliver the annual Trite Trophy, dishonoring the worst cliché of the year in sports, as well as its troubled sibling, the somewhat annual Media Label of the Year column (last year’s winner: Hot Pocket Heiress).
A considerable percentage of all awards, from the enduringly profound to the perfectly fungible, exist to start arguments. Even the revered Nobels have dabbled in controversy, most recently, like, now.
How in this award-flinging world could Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, the scientists whose work on the potentialities of mRNA were indispensable in the eventual development of the COVID vaccines, as discussed in this column in May, not win the Nobel Prize in Medicine?
The Prize went to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian “for their discovery of receptors for temperature and touch.”
The Nobel committee has to learn to read the room, right?
“I’m sure these people made exceptional contributions,” tweeted cancer research scientist Vicky Foster. “But this was really the year to give the Nobel to Katalin Karikó and colleagues for laying the groundwork for mRNA vaccines.”
Steven Hobbs, a professor of biology at Howard College in Texas, told a British newspaper “this selection is a black eye to those women and the world as a whole.”
In any event, the worst black eye imaginable was avoided in recent years when the judges laughed off multiple nominations of Donald J. Trump, who from all accounts may have actually anticipated winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
It’s historically obvious that anyone can be nominated for the Peace Prize. Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Adolph Hitler — all nominated. According to the Nobel website, being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize “is not an endorsement or extended honour to imply affiliation with the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Ya think?
Winning is another thing. Winners: Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter, Lech Walesa, Barack Obama, Mother Teresa, and others back to 1901, others who were generally thought to be moving the world and the human condition forward.
This year’s winners, announced in Oslo in October, were Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov for, according to the foundation, “their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”
Ms. Ressa, a former Time Magazine Person of the Year, continues to lead the global fight against disinformation. Mr. Muratov, a long-time Russian free speech advocate facing greater obstacles by the hour, triggered a government crackdown on foreign journalists and activists when news of the Peace Prize broke, according to the New York Times. Desperate to snap Mr. Muratov’s momentum, the Kremlin designation nine journalists/ activists “foreign agents,” severely restricting their movements and operations.
On which side of the Peace Prize dynamic is Mr. Trump’s base of operations, do you suppose? On one occasion when he was nominated by European wingnut autocrat wannabes, the former president hurried to the White House in anticipation of wall-to-wall news coverage. The prizes themselves get minimal coverage, let alone the nominations, but Mr. Trump was disappointed.
The Nobels have become something of an obsession for the 45th president, even if, as with just about everything, his entire knowledge of them could be written on a bar napkin.
He once tweeted that journalists should return their “precious Nobles,” for reporting on his administration. There is no Nobel for journalism. He meant the Pulitzers. Also, though it is not stated explicitly anywhere on the Nobel website, I think the judges lean away from nominees who can’t spell the name of the award.
It’s said the Nobels can take years or even decades to catch up with deserving winners, as is likely in the case of this year’s medicine award, so my advice to Mr. Trump would be patience, or perhaps a switch to another category.
Perhaps chemistry or medicine.
But then, well, the COVID suggestion:
“And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?”
Would he be interested in Mara-Lago Employee of the Month?