Colin Sheridan: Why actors’ round tables have become awards season’s strangest performance

Awards-season round tables have turned artistic admiration into ritualised excess, where praise replaces honesty and performance eclipses genuine criticism

Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley. 'Buckley speaks of Mescal with the hushed awe of someone describing a religious apparition.'

There is a relatively new genre of performance that has emerged in recent years, and it is neither film nor theatre, neither tragedy nor farce, though it borrows heavily from all. 

It is known as the actors’ round table.