The Golden Globe awards are over, and so are the BAFTAs. The Oscars just happened. If you are excited about feature films, documentaries and the entertainment industry in general, you might be really interested in all these celebrations of the craft, to the extent of staying up or taking time off to watch the telecast live, track it on Twitter and if you are really a huge fan, you might make it a full party at home, perhaps with chips, salsa and drinks, or go the full hog and have a barbeque with friends and family dressed up to cheer their favourite movie, maybe even have a side of betting to make it spicy.
Awards season can be exciting, but for many others, these awards mean nothing at all, and they would be doing all these party, like celebrations for other things, like cricket, for example or American or European sports. Maybe some of you had Super Bowl parties and got your game on for Kansas, and others did something like that for European football. Maybe it is neither movies or sports, but pageants or MasterChef – the lists of awards and celebrations are endless. In a world where practically anything has an audience and special occasions are live telecast somewhere or the other, on the internet if not on cable TV, we get to celebrate these things live and on as big a screen as we want.
Whatever the hobby or interest area that you are keen on, there is something magical about watching it happen. The movie buff could very well just read about it on social media next day, and the sports fan could just watch the highlights along with the news or on Hotstar during their commute, but there is so much joy in watching things live, especially with loved ones.
Love is something like that. One could also be in a relationship where everything is functional, and things happen by calendar appointments, routines and structures, with hardly any emotion. Most of us though, want to love like it is the big awards night. We want our love to be the big winner, to be celebrated with friends and family, to see it live. That, probably, is one of the primary reasons why people have major weddings and commitment ceremonies for which they call hundreds, if not thousands, of people, throw enormous feasts and make sure it is an event everyone will remember – like having Jennifer Lopez and Shakira dance together for a Super Bowl.
One could love quite privately, and really not want the huge big blowout of a party, but chances are that you’d still want to celebrate it in a more intimate manner, like the sedate but special ceremonies of the Nobel Prize announcements and the dinners after. The scale and size of the awards, and how public they are might be different, but loving and being loved can certainly feel like the Best Picture award on Oscar night, and by all means, celebrate it.
The author is a counsellor with InnerSight