It’s been near impossible to get away from talk of the entertainment industry’s annual series of self back-patting humbly referred to as Awards Season. In fact, it’s so difficult to get away from that even this place – the last bastion of mundanity and apathy – is about to weigh in. And what better way to do it with a fabulous awards show, presented entirely through the medium of text, which shall be named completely on the fly as the Nobody Actually Cares About The Recipients Of Accolades We’ve Arbitrarily Assigned Importance To But Are Really Completely Meaningless, or the NACATROAWAAITBARCMs for short.
Let’s begin shall we, because nothing kills an award ceremony like an overblown introduction. Something some of our recipients tonight could actually learn from. After all, when one puts on an awards ceremony, another one would expect to see the awards more than the ceremony.
So we begin with our first prize: The NACATROAWAAITBARCM for “biggest public misperception of a barbed witticism as heartless malicious intent” goes to…
The Twitter-based BAFTA audience, The BAFTAs
This is first nomination for an entire viewing audience in absolutely anything. Their nomination and subsequent win is long overdue as audiences are generally dopey as fuck.
After coming down with a typical case of tongue-in-cheek smart-arsery, BAFTA host and Emperor of the Virtual Kingdom of Twitter, Stephen Fry, officially resigned his post (the latter) by removing himself from the kingdom, along with his collection of text-based memories. The spark: a comment on the irony of a winning costume designer’s dressed-down attire. The result: people on Twitter basically doing what people on Twitter basically do. Famous get their fair share of shit thanks to the wonders of the Internet and the simple-minded twat-bags who don’t know how to communicate properly. The instant access and sense of empowerment through perceived anonymity sadly causes the masses to forget what filters are, meaning it’s only a matter of time before everyone on the web hates each other because someone once used the term “Bag-Lady”.
Incidentally, that acceptance speech would’ve won the NACATROAWAAITBARCM for most hyphens used in an acceptance speech. However, sadly no such award exists.
And so, onto our next pointless accolade: The NACATROAWAAITBARCM for “most visually disturbing performance that managed to impress its intended audience” is awarded to…
Rihanna, The BRITs
This is Rihanna’s first win for a visually disturbing performance after narrowly missing out after the debacle of the CGI effects in her Umbrella video.
Tragically, the BRIT Awards have strayed into the territory of The X Factor, capable of only really paying attention to the zeitgeist it just got fed on a spoon your mum told you was an aeroplane, even though she made the sound of a speeding motorcycle straight afterwards. Basically it’s for seventeen-year-old girls who evidently think that rubbing one’s bottom against a dude’s crotch is aspirational. In an age where feminism is a growing socio-political movement, thank goodness we have Rihanna to swivel her ass cheeks into a camera lens before pretty much simulating public anal sex with a bloke the Internet tells me is called Derek or something. Nothing says “no” to misogyny quite like a woman impressing young girls by offering to be violated.
Even more tragically, this got the biggest crowd squeal of the night as gaggles of teenage girls made sure to film the whole thing on their iPhones and Instagram their hashtags with emojis and lols.
We have one more meaningless prize to arbitrarily allocate tonight, let’s just get on with it because my fingers are sore from typing: The NACATROAWAAITBARCM for “most predictable reaction to the fulfilment of an Internet-generated prophecy” gets flung in the direction of…
Everyone who’s ever used the Internet to share in the memetic joke of Leonardo DiCaprio’s failure to win an Oscar, The Oscars
In an unprecedented move, this is the second award tonight that’s been delivered to a mass collective. Accepting the award on behalf of mankind is recently deposed Internet Lord, Stephen Fry, dressed as a Bag-Lady.
So perhaps it didn’t start out as a prophecy. In fact, it was quite the opposite: the drippy fella from Titanic was doomed to never win an acting Oscar, or any Oscar for that matter. Not even Best Original Song, even if he recorded a Bond theme, which must by law win outright whenever applicable. Ultimately, as the web’s population has grabbed hold of the global in-joke, it’s escalated to the point where there was only ever going to be one outcome. The joke can’t go on forever. DiCaprio would have to eventually win someday. And when he did, the dwellers of the Internet would shit themselves in the form of memes and smear that shit all over their social news feeds.
As we go forward, the absence of the long-running joke means that only two possible outcomes can transpire from here. Either the general populace will need to latch onto another celebrity for another common anecdote to be accepted on a worldwide scale, or they’ll have to actually think things for themselves. The power is in the people’s hands, and as we know, the people en masse are generally excellent at making shit decisions.
And so concludes our NACATROAWAAITBARCM awards show. Sorry, it seems we’ve overrun by about half an hour. Therefore, in a change to our regularly scheduled programming, we present something you’ve probably not seen before… in Welsh.
Once upon an afternoon, I watched an episode of Welsh soap opera Pobol Y Cwm. Don’t ask me why, I was a bored student at the time. If you’ve never seen it, just imagine Emmerdale set in Middle Earth without the elaborate costume department. Ever since, the language of Cymraeg has mystified my simple Saesneg brain with double-L throat growls and stray Ys and Ws appearing in Countdown‘s Vowel pile.
Contrary to the ignorance contained within the last paragraph, I like the fact that one of our dear island’s native tongues is proudly spoken today by its champions. As one of the oldest languages in the UK, its use in modern culture is made all the more special by various musicians, including the below piece of what I’m going to describe as “ambient rave”, or “ambywnt raef”.
The title may not be Welsh but it’s content most certainly is. Either way, I’ll sit back and enjoy listening to it since I’d be hopeless as pronouncing any of it. I’m nowhere near being able to pronounce NACATROAWAAITBARCM, let alone “Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch”.
Gwenno – Fratolish Hiang Perpeshki
Jamie Walsh 
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