Which of the three major award shows do Americans care the most about? Is it the Oscars? The Emmys? The Grammys?
The brutal truth is that the vast majority of Americans honestly don’t really give a crap about any of them, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll.
The poll, which was conducted Feb. 5-7, asked 1,000 adults in the U.S. to select one of the three award shows as their favorite. Eighteen percent picked the Oscars, 9 percent picked the Grammys, 2 percent picked the Emmys and 2 percent said they weren’t sure.
But the most popular answer by far was this one: “I don’t care about any of them.” Sixty-eight percent of Americans went that route.
In an attempt to get a better sense of why people don’t really care about award shows, I asked my colleagues for their preference. As media professionals, I assumed they would have more favorable opinions about the shows than the general populace. By and large, I was wrong.
“Award shows are awful and we should stop paying attention to them,” said Stephanie Marcus, who literally runs award coverage at The Huffington Post, so, yeah. “They are the Hollywood equivalent of running for Prom Queen and should be considered meaningless.”
“Awards season is just another form of advertising designed to attract one more round of audiences,” she continued without fear. “While they are all terrible, the Emmys are boring, the Oscars are exhausting and the Grammys seem like they pick winners after pulling names from a hat.”
When I followed up with Marcus over chat to let her know her response was going to be published on the Internet, you know, for all the world to see, she replied, "Good! Ban award shows!"
"I hate them all," agreed Julia Craven, a HuffPost Politics reporter who has a "particular distaste" for the Grammys.
While most of my colleagues were less, uh, straightforward in their responses, they were still largely down on award shows all the same. Shane Ferro, a business reporter at HuffPost, touched on two common themes: the lack of diversity at the shows and the Internet's ability to repackage the best parts anyway.
"Why do I care about watching some rich white, mostly male, people I don't know congratulating each other, punctuated by like a million commercials?” she asked. “Plus, I can see everyone's dresses the day after on the Internet, which used to be the only reason to watch."
People had particular issues with each award show. The Grammys are too long. The Oscars are too white. The Emmys are the Emmys. But Paige Lavender, a senior politics editor at HuffPost, said the real problem with the poll was that it didn't include the best award show of them all.
"Nothing is as good as the Golden Globes," she said. "The Globes are like the Oscars' more fun sibling. The hosts are always funnier, the booze is more free-flowing and it seems like there's less pressure on the stars, so it feels like everyone's having more fun."
But as much as these people might say they hate the three main shows, I'm not convinced they wouldn't be watching them even if they didn't have to for work. Sara Boboltz, an entertainment editor, expressed displeasure with the Oscars and Grammys in her response. But, she admitted, "If I'm being really honest ... I still want to see pretty people in shiny dresses."
Don't we all.
The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted Feb. 5-7 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGov's opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.
The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov's nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here. More details on the polls' methodology are available here.
Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some, but not all, potential survey errors. YouGov's reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample, rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.
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