Time for Some Serious Awards

Here's the American Library Association's complete list of winners of its 2007 Newbery, Caldecott, Printz, Sibert, King, etc. awards, announced yesterday.

Yesterday I posted about the Newbery shortlist's Seriousness, but I don't actually disagree with the judges' choices. All the winning and honored books of this year that I've read are indeed excellent (with one exception, and that doesn't reflect on the area of the honor). I suspect the list above offers a good guide to fine children's literature of 2006.

But it also offers more evidence of this rule in life:

Big Awards Make People Very Serious.

Readers and critics who love humor, parody, alternate worlds, and reading simply for pleasure become much more Serious when it comes time to give the biggest and most prestigious awards in their fields.

For the Newbery Medal for children's literature, that means contemporary and historical fiction about Overcoming Hardships, societal or familial, almost always prevail over humor, adventure, and fantasy or science fiction. Stories that bring us into Other Cultures also have an edge, as long as those cultures are real. Of course, there are exceptions, like 2004's Tale of Desperaux, but the pattern holds up generally over several decades of winners. It's just the way our culture tends to think.

This isn't confined to the Newberys, of course. It's probably even more pronounced in the awards for other artistic fields, such as the Oscars (nominations announced today). How many people still think that The English Patient was a better movie in 1996 than Fargo or Jerry Maguire, two other nominees that year? Heck, for effective filmmaking it's hard to top that year's box-office champ, Independence Day; any movie that can make you accept alien invaders and Bill Pullman as President has succeeded in suspending your disbelief.

But The English Patient was Serious historical fiction, based on a literary novel and performed by British and French actors. How much more classy can ya get? The others movies I mentioned were--how shall I say this?--enjoyable. It took an three-year worldwide box-office rampage for the fantasy saga The Lord of the Rings to win a Best Picture Oscar--and then only when it was clear the quality wouldn't sag.

The same attitudes also affect acting awards. The best acting performance(s) of 1996 came from Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor, and he wasn't even nominated for an Oscar then. He was a comic actor in a broadly comic movie, but what made that story work was the humanity Murphy gave to its central character, Sherman, even through all the makeup.

This year Murphy appears to have a good shot to win a Best Supporting Actor award because he's given a Serious performance in Dreamgirls. As with Red Buttons and Robin Williams, Academy voters might honor a respected comic in the supporting category rather than as a lead.