Clodagh Finn: Call me a loser but why do we turn everything into a competition?

It's impossible to avoid those programmes which make a viewer feel distinctly below par, writes Clodagh Finn

Cedric Gibbons, the Dubliner who designed the Oscar statuette, left, and Kenneth Branagh, who won best original screenplay for ‘Belfast’.

If you think winning is important – which we clearly do – here is an interesting way to reframe the Oscars awards ceremony; that vaguely obscene parade of fame, entitlement and, to be fair, talent.

Every time a recipient holds up the famous gold statuette, we might consider it an Irish win because the man who designed it came from Dublin.

Indeed, Cedric Gibbons was our most successful Oscar winner. As the film art director who pioneered realist set design, he was nominated for 39 awards and won a staggering 11 of them.

Born in Dublin in 1893 to Austin and Veronica Gibbons, the family emigrated to New York when Cedric was a child. He trained as an architect but went on to become one of the most celebrated art designers in Hollywood, working as supervising artistic director at MGM for over 30 years.

He was also asked to design the Oscar statuette as one of the founding members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1928. He created a gold-plated knight holding a crusader’s sword, a design which has remained almost unchanged for eight decades.

I thought of that when Kenneth Branagh held it aloft while accepting the gong for Best Original Screenplay for Belfast, going on to pay tribute to “an amazing city and a fantastic people".

I thought of it too after seeing footage of actor Will Smith’s now infamous slap. One of the many disturbing things about that incident is how he felt the need to ‘defend’ his wife Jada Pinkett Smith when comedian Chris Rock made a tasteless joke at her expense.

It had an 18th-century pistols-at-dawn feel to it which might partly explain why it whipped around the world overshadowing the more important moment when Jane Campion won best director for The Power of Dog, only the third woman to win in that category in the history of the Academy Awards.

But then, why do we make the same mistake every year and expect the Academy Awards to reflect the kind of diversity and meritocracy that we long to see in real life?.

Jane Campion, winner of the award for best director for "The Power of the Dog", poses in the press room at the Oscars on Sunday, March 27, 2022, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. Picture: Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP

We should know by now that the world of the Oscars is not real life except in one very unsettling aspect. The ranking, the rating and the spirit of competition seems to have seeped into every aspect of the world around us.

I’m not saying that the Oscars is to blame, but it is one particularly well-dressed manifestation of the seemingly ubiquitous urge to turn everything in the modern world into a competition.

There was a time when leisure time used to be, well, leisurely, but I can’t be alone in thinking that I’m failing at life if I’m not training for a marathon or upping my baking skills, or cooking skills, or interior design skills, or gardening skills, or… heavens, it’s simply exhausting thinking about the number of activities that have been turned into competitions on our screens.

I can’t do that soft-shoe shuffle across the kitchen floor without hearing Brian Redmond, the judge of Dancing with the Stars, commenting on technique. Who knows, he might even be complimentary because his decency shines out even though he has been cast in the role of critical judge.

The point is that we are living in a world where so much is evaluated, measured and ranked that we are constantly being pitted against one another – not to mention ourselves. You might not have an inner judge telling you that you should be a little bit more Master Chef when putting food on the table, but it’s impossible to avoid those programmes which, unintentionally perhaps, make a viewer feel distinctly below par.

When you think about it, the number of shows based on competition is staggering. We have several home-grown ones; the aforementioned Dancing with the Stars, Home of the Year, Ireland’s Fittest Family, Super Garden, to mention a few.

Jockey Nina Carberry and Pasquale La Rocca winners of Dancing With The Stars.

Then, there’s The Apprentice, The Great British Bake Off and countless others which turn a dizzying number of hobbies, from sewing and sculpting, into races of one kind or another.

There is even a BBC programme featuring tractor racers which is designed to show that “rural competitiveness can be converted into high-octane entertainment”. It’s called The Fast and Farmer (ish), which is supposed to be a pun on the action movies Fast & Furious, but like the word play, the shows pushes the notion of entertainment too far.

You can see why programme-makers like the format; it’s a tried-and-tested, audience-generating formula that is often cheap to make. It is guaranteed TV ratings by TV rating, if you know what I mean.

I worry, though, what it is doing in the real world. People often talk about reality TV and social media in terms of Big Brother, which it apt, but it is also helpful to explore how our appetite for both has forced us into a kind of jail, Kilmainham jail to be exact.

Let me explain. Kilmainham jail is a panopticon. In other words, its architectural design facilitates maximum surveillance of prisoners. Visit it and you might be invited to peer into a cell through the “eye that never sleeps”, the nickname for the spy-hole in the bolted door on the east wing.

A strip of carpet on the landing outside once hushed approaching footsteps so that guards might watch without being seen. Prisoners knew that they might be watched at any point and, so the theory went, acted accordingly. The idea was that by living in a ‘House of Inspection’, they would be rehabilitated under the light of this all-seeing power.

Observe, confine, correct; those were the guiding principles behind Jeremy Bentham’s prison. It was, he said, “a machine to grind rogues honest”.

We don’t need to be locked up today because we enter a kind of prison of our own free will, scrolling through the mobile-phone feeds that compare cooking triumphs and training regimes. Or we wear a fitbit to measure, rate and adjust our movements.

Or to extrapolate from Bentham, we observe ourselves, confine our ‘bad habits, and correct them. French philosopher and historian of ideas Michel Foucault explained in Discipline and Punish how Bentham’s “system of isolating visibility” still functioned in today’s prisons, workplaces, schools and hospitals.

When people know they are visible, or might be, they behave accordingly which means that you can obtain power at the lowest possible cost. More than that, those within are only too happy to take part.

Foucault might be horrified to see how well the panoptic principle functions in the digital world, not to mention our rush to embrace and, to an unknown extent, internalise the shows that turn us into rivals.

Why does it always have to be about excluding and whittling down rather than including? Call me a loser, but I’d much prefer to live in a world that didn’t turn everything into a competition. And one in which there were more TV shows with one for everyone in the audience.