It’s more than a week since the Bafta awards, but controversy still rumbles over where the statues went, and why. Despite being tipped to sweep the board, the popular and innovative Life on Mars failed to win anything from the Bafta academy – making do with the sop of the Audience Award, instead. This was something that the ITV News – evaluating the awards with the same logic and gravitas as they would a war, a cabinet spat or, let’s face it, given that it’s ITV, Posh Spice – described as “surprising”. And of course, it was. Everyone loved Life on Mars. It had an animated homage to Camberwick Green, during which a Claymation DCI Gene Hunt “kicked in” the head of a “nonce”. It had, simultaneously, wit, balls and a mass audience – a triumvirate so rare that you could promise each and every similarly blessed project the hand in marriage of a Nolan sister and still have the lovely Bernadette unwed, come 2008. Life On Mars was about as great as British television gets. It was an apogee.

The problem was, though, that it wasn’t “award winning stuff”. I mean, obviously it literally wasn’t award winning stuff – it didn’t win any awards. But it was also the kind of thing that never could win awards. As I’m sure you’ve probably noticed, during indignant pub conversations, the best album of the year very rarely wins the Mercury Prize. Similarly, the best actor tends not to get the Best Actor Oscar, and some awful dirge from Serbia wins Eurovision. There’s a whole psychology at work behind mankind’s choices in what we like to say has “won”. Indeed, there is such a rigid aesthetic behind what wins – as instantly recognisable as film noir or magic realism – that it might as well be declared a separate genre, Award-Winning Stuff, and used to categorise books, records and films in Waterstone’s.

Obviously Ricky Gervais nailed a huge chunk of it in the speech he wrote for Kate Winslet in Extras. That was where she explained that you were guaranteed an Oscar if you do a film about the Holocaust, “or play a mental”. Obviously, Gervais didn’t have time to go into the full list of guaranteed Oscar roles, but there is a little more leeway for a gong than merely Holocaust and mentals. You can also be a suicidal alcoholic, a psychopath, someone with an horrific illness, someone who makes the ultimate sacrifice for their country, or a gay.

You’ll note that, in that list, there aren’t many dancing sailors. No joking. No smiling, really, unless it’s either a) a psychotic smile, issued just before a particularly horrific murder, or b) a brave smile, issued just before dying of Aids/cirrhosis/Second-World War. In a nutshell, we don’t give prizes to witty, breezy, enjoyable films. We give prizes to films we admire, not love.

And, as it is with the Oscars – the most high-profile awards humanity gives itself, bigger than the Olympics or the Nobel – so it is with TV and music. No fabulous, up-beat, life-affirming record wins a Mercury, or a Brit, or a Grammy. Abba – a fairly safe bet, should you be forced to name the greatest pop band ever – never won an award during their lifetime. Not one. No Grammys – not even for Dancing Queen, widely regarded to be the greatest single ever made. Sting, on the other hand, has won six Grammys. This is because he writes ponderous, furrow-browed ballads about international politics, the destruction of the rainforest and his dead dad. Things which, within the context of listening to music during a normal day – driving, doing the washing up, dancing around a bit drunk – would be almost wholly useless. And yet this is what wins the awards. We’re a puzzling species. We manifest a wholly illogical, and possibly ruinous, tendency to vote for rock stars and film stars who think they’re politicians, and politicians who think they’re rock and film stars.

Of course, it’s often not “our” fault. The biggest awards – Oscar, Bafta, Grammy, Brit – are usually not anything to do with hoi polloi, but are, instead, awards granted by an academy of the artists’ “peers”. There are two things you need to know about artists’ “peers”: 1) They hate and resent every last goddamn person on the shortlist who isn’t them and 2) “Academies of peers” are much like “juries of peers”; the loudest, most belligerent person there will decide the vote. Think of every self-righteous, belligerent bore you’ve ever met. They’re never massive fans of anything enjoyable, like Abba, or Doctor Who, are they? They’re always into something angry about the war, or the environment, or George Bush – possibly confusing “spending an enjoyable and life-affirming hour of leisure on the sofa” with “fighting injustice in the international political area”.

Personally, I think that the Moran Method of award-giving should be adopted for the next ten years, to try to loosen “academies” up a little. Until 2017, no matter what the award – Booker, Oscar, Olympic gold medal for cycle polo – the award should be given posthumously to Freddie Mercury, just to remind everyone that the apogee of human performance can, sometimes, involve pretending to have sex with a microphone-stand, screaming “Come on Wembley!” and jumping off a piano over Brian May.

A haunting mistake in the history of film

Ironically, the Oscars had nailed this vexing values system at their inception in 1929. That year, there were two Best Picture Oscars: Most Outstanding Production Oscar and the Most Artistic Quality of Production. The former was for something popular, while the latter – aside from sounding as if it was invented by the King of the Scandinavian Nerds – was for the “classy”, heavyweight stuff. This deftly addressed the fact that there are awards that we give with our heads and awards that we give with our hearts.

Of course, such an obvious idea was immediately rejected and, for the next Oscars in 1930, they dropped both awards, and simply made it Best Picture. This immediately guaranteed a future where actors with a knack for playing mad, gay, dying, concentration camp victims would clean up, while Ghostbusters got nothing.

They wuz robbed

So, just to recap: Citizen Kane, Singin’ In the Rain, Life of Brian, The Producers, Some Like It Hot, Alfred Hitchcock, Richard Burton, Donald Sutherland, James Dean, Harrison Ford, Star Wars, the Marx Brothers, Ernst Lubitsch, Tim Burton, Stanley Kubrick, Danny Elfman, Bill Murray, Orson Welles, Cary Grant. They never got Oscars.

Led Zeppelin, Abba, the Beach Boys, Crowded House, the Supremes, Guns N’Roses, David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, Chuck Berry, R.E.M. They never got Grammys.

Life on Mars, Doctor Who, This Life, Peep Show, Top of the Pops, Bottom, The Goodies, Harry Hill’s TV Burp, Planet Earth, The Sweeney, Celebrity Big Brother. They never got a Bafta.

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