Lensing question

(Macdonald, pg 67)

"The whole competitive struggle is presented as a lottery in which a few winners, no more talented or energetic than any one else, drew the lucky tickets."

Amber and the rest of the crew in the show "drew the lucky tickets", in the sense that they were able to perform on the show because of their looks, connections (amber), or talent (link). However, Seaweed, Inez were not as lucky as them to perform on air because they didn't have their lucky break yet. But is this all an artist requires to make it big ? What is success to them ? 

At the end of the show, Inez wins the pageant only because Link pulled her onto the set spontaneously. This suggests that if Inez wasn't present at that moment, she may not have that opportunity to display her dancing talents on screen. Do we count this as her lucky ticket to fame ?

I'm also intrigued by the proposal of a homogenised/integrated set  on the Corny Collins show. Macdonald talks about a homogenised culture in page 62 of his article, of how people from different backgrounds, all walks of life, are able to sync in with one culture - the mass culture. In Hairspray, the blacks were integrated in the show, and Negro Day was cancelled, which signifies the breaking down of barriers between people from different class, backgrounds, race. However, should we be worried that this coalesce of people would result in the shift in "idols of production" to those of "idols of consumption" (Macdonald, page 67) ? 

Would this integration of races be the next popular thing ? And then we would then have to witness its degradation as businessman, alike to the manager in Hairspray, demands for the next thing that sells ? And this new group of entertainers would have to conform to doing things that sells (link that to "idols of consumption") ? Can these artists really bring new things into the industry ?

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haha that's all for now

The case against awards; Why the wrong person always wins

The author does not think highly of awards. In the beginning of the article, he seems to be skeptical about awards because of his past experience. The author finds fault in the awards he mentioned and explains his reasons for disliking them explicitly. As the article proceeds, the author delves into the human mentality of prize, and despite knowing how absurd the process of choosing the recipient for the award is, those people who criticize the final outcome of the award are those that really care about it.

The author is strongly against the process of choosing the awards, and hopes that the criterion of choosing the winner should be fair but he does not elaborate further on how this may go about. While the author may seem appalled and irate by the way the awards are given, he is the very person he described as “those most convinced that, sat the Oscars do a horrible job of rating films are the very people who cling to their emotional investment in the outcome.”

For Putin, a Peace Prize for a Decision to Go to War

I did a double take when I first read the title. A Peace Prize for deciding to go to war? Is this a Chinese method of improving relations with Russia (or just Putin)? The Chinese committee awarded this year's Confucius Peace Prize honoured the winner, Vladimir V. Putin, prime minister of Russia, for his decision to go to war with Chechnya.

Russian students Dakhova and Ostasheako hold the Chinese Confucius Peace Prize after accepting it on behalf of Putin in Beijing Photo: REUTERS

Even the author (Edward Wong) seemed a little doubtful about this. Where did this dubious award come from? Wong mentioned how the organising committee awarded "what they call their" peace prize and there was "curiously little reporting" in the Chinese media about the award. In fact, the news of how Putin received the Confucius Peace Prize was hyped up through Twitter. The previous winner of this prize, Lien Chan, a Taiwanese Politician, had never heard of the award, and his prize was curiously given to "a young girl with no relation" to him.

On the committee that gives out this award sits a self-acclaimed descendant from Confucius' lineage and a professor at Peking University, Kong Qingdong, who is asked to leave because of his rude actions towards a journalist. Another member of the committee who had left the group is starting another award with the Americans. All these strange characters on the judging committee truly reflects the kind of award the Confucius Peace Prize.

Apparently this publicised (or rather the lack of) Confucius Peace Prize is a phony award presented to Putin with the borrowed namesake of the Culture Ministry. The original award was supposedly the Confucius World Peace Prize. After this incident, the Culture Ministry decided not to give out the Confucius World Peace Prize award. Perhaps they decided not be embarrassed any further...