There is a peculiar confidence that arrives with consensus.
Once a winner is announced, something subtle shifts. Conversation tightens. Opinions harden. People begin speaking not about what they experienced, but about what is now established. The work has been named, categorized, filed.
This is the moment criticism quietly exits the room.
Consensus feels like understanding because it is efficient. It reduces complexity into something portable. A season of performances becomes a list. A difficult film becomes a sentence fragment. Nuance is folded away for easier storage.
Clarity, however, is rarely efficient.
Real engagement with art is slow. It involves contradiction. It allows for the discomfort of being moved without knowing why, or unmoved despite admiring the craft. It tolerates ambivalence. It requires admitting uncertainty without rushing to correct it.
Award discourse has little patience for that.
Instead, it rewards decisiveness. It elevates certainty. It treats disagreement as ignorance rather than difference. The loudest opinions gain authority simply by surviving repetition.
But criticism does not begin with conclusions. It begins with doubt.
“I’m not sure why this stayed with me.”
“I didn’t connect to it, but I suspect that’s about me.”
“There’s something here I haven’t fully articulated yet.”
Those statements do not trend. They do not travel well. They do not resolve neatly.
They do, however, respect the work.
Consensus closes conversations by pretending they are finished. Criticism opens them by admitting they are not. One provides comfort. The other provides depth.
Award season does not fail because people care too much. It falters because care is too often replaced with certainty. Passion becomes performance. Thought becomes posture.
The result is not discourse but choreography. Everyone knows where to stand. Everyone knows when to applaud. Dissent becomes suspicious, not because it is wrong, but because it disrupts the rhythm.
Yet art has never thrived on rhythm alone.
The works that endure are rarely the ones that achieved immediate agreement. They are the ones that resisted compression. The ones that unsettled, confused, or divided before they clarified… if they ever did.
Consensus is a record of alignment, not insight.
Clarity arrives later, if it arrives at all.
And it rarely announces itself with a trophy.
Brian Brijbag 