The Food Oscars Should Take a Cue From the Real Oscars
Why adding nominees would give more people a stake in the Beard Awards — and help out struggling journalists as well
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In May 1991, shortly after the liberation of Kuwait — and a few months before the collapse of the Soviet Union — Los Angeles Times critic Ruth Reichl documented a more lighthearted event in our history: the first ever James Beard Awards.
Nearly 1,000 restaurateurs, chefs, and others gathered on the deck of the M.S. New Yorker for the party. It was such a serious collection of culinary professionals that had the ship sunk, it would have taken “American cooking along with it,” Reichl quipped.
I understand everyone survived.
Reichl covered the New York affair with a sharp eye. She wrote of marzipan cakes shaped like art deco buildings, corn tartlets stuffed with crab, a lifetime achievement award for MFK Fisher (probably deserved!), unnecessary jokes by future “Good Will Hunting” scene stealer George Plimpton, and a French chef shuddering when Nancy Silverton won best pastry chef (yikes!).
The headline referred to the evening as the “Food Oscars.”
Perhaps you’ve heard the term. In the decades that followed, just about every news outlet imaginable has picked up on the comparison as a quick way to frame the awards. Using one thing to explain another basic thing can be dicey — “this lasagna is a savory Italian baklava of sorts,” but it’s not clear that this ceremony is actually a basic thing.
The Beards, however beloved in certain circles, don’t attract billions of folks for a telecast led by Jimmy Kimmel; it’s not even broadcast on a television network. So a phrase like “Oscars” of gastronomy can help convey the pomp (yes) and prestige (maybe) of the Beards, even if the metaphor isn’t spot on — no metaphor really is.
Still, one of the most fascinating things about Reichl’s missive is that she didn’t actually label the event the “food Oscars” herself. She did, however, think things through. Here’s a key line:
What distinguished these particular awards from the Oscars or the Emmys or the Obies (besides the extraordinary food that was served) is that everybody seemed to be everybody else’s biggest fan.
Reichl wrote about everyone thanking each other at the podium rather than fawning over agents and movie studio heads. She drew a distinction between the “conservative” Academy and the Beards, who were focusing on “the food revolution that has swept America.” And she noted how the “loser” of the wine service award accepted a medal on behalf of the winner, who was a no-show. This struck her as unique to the Beards.
“Imagine that Jeremy Irons hadn’t been able to make it to the Academy Awards this year — and had asked loser Robert De Niro to accept in his stead.”
Reichl wasn’t using an Oscars comparison as easy shorthand. Instead, she was doing what any good critic does. She was wrestling with the idea of that analogy, without coming to a definitive conclusion. And she seemed to be implying that the Oscars could maybe learn a thing or two from the Beards.
I’ve been thinking about that Reichl column lately.
Or more precisely, I’ve been thinking about how, a few decades later, the Beards could actually take a few cues from the Oscars — not to mention the Pulitzers, the MLB playoffs, and other competitions that people like me irrationally analyze and obsess over.
It’s all been on my mind because earlier this week, the James Beard Foundation issued nominations for its media awards, a sprawling group that includes cookbooks, broadcast media, documentaries, feature reporting, social media accounts, profiles, unscripted shows, and reviewing.
The ceremony honors scores of amazing authors, and it still blows my mind that there are media awards at all, even if they’re held on a separate night.
Imagine the Tonys giving out statues to globally recognized Broadway stars in addition to their eloquent (if lesser-known) critics!
But here are a few things that have never sat well with me. The Beards name just three nominations for each journalism category. The chef and restaurant entrants, by contrast, get a deep list of semi-finalists in the winter. Then, in the spring, most individual culinary categories are whittled down to five nominees, about the same number as for most Oscar categories.
No semi-finalists for journalists. So be it.
But for now, I wish that the James Beard Foundation would expand the media categories to five or more finalists, as I’ve called for before. That nice gesture would be particularly welcome these days — this era when scores of career journalists are losing their livelihoods. Nearly 3,100 people in print, broadcast, and digital were laid off last year.
Some of those folks are trying to keep their names in the fray with newsletters, Substacks, personal blogs, and tough freelance work that usually doesn’t even cover the cost of monthly COBRA premiums. Others who work full-time in food media — many of whom are unionizing for better pay — are hoping a nomination might give them the extra dose of attention they need from their bosses.
No, jacking up the number Beard nominations isn’t going to save journalism. But it’s a simple and (relatively) free thing to do. It isn’t a policy change that requires massive investments. It doesn’t need to be phased in like a minimum wage hike. It just requires the Beard Foundation to say, hey, let’s shine a light on even more amazing journalism that we’ve maybe already studied, vetted, and voted on.
It also might warm up a few souls out there that could use a little warming, and encourage them to keep writing about our amazing culinary community.
Here’s something you might not know: The Beards have actually expanded their list of nominees before. Just after the pandemic, the national “best new restaurant” category jumped up to ten nominees. Other categories would be well served to let in a few more folks as well. I’m thinking in particular of Best Chef, California, where just five people make it to the finalist round — effectively pitting the largest cities in our biggest state against one another.
Sure, most Oscar categories have just five nominees, as we know, but most of us also know there are a lot more restaurants out there than new films. Let’s make a little extra room.
If you watch way too many awards shows like I do — Chris Rock’s “Banana Republic” Iraq War critique remains a highlight for me — you likely know that the Oscars expanded its “Best Picture” category in 2010.
It moved from five nominees to, eventually, 10.
One of the motivating factors — as the academy’s own president suggested — was “The Dark Knight” getting snubbed. Make of that what you will; nothing like a Hollywood blockbuster (about a billionaire with a violent hobby) getting overlooked to make an awards ceremony better.
But that change indeed made the ceremony better.
“I’d go so far as to say it saved the show,” Kyle Buchanan of the New York Times wrote a decade after the change went into effect. “No Oscar year has ever lacked for 10 great movies, though they may have lacked voters with the imagination to recognize them as such,” Buchanan added.
The expansion, Buchanan wrote, helped the show look past period dramas and shiny awards bait (“Cider House Rules”) to include a more exciting and wide-ranging field. That translated to Best Picture nods for popular favorites like “District 9” and “Black Panther,” as well as the more independently minded “Call Me by Your Name,” “Moonlight,” and the international Korean hit that was “Parasite.”
This wasn’t just about highlighting more voices, though. The expanded field encouraged everyday viewers to watch more movies. It got more folks interested in an awards show they might’ve otherwise viewed as out of touch. And I like to think the expansion helped solidify a low-level national past time: folks debating Oscar picks, as spoofed in this subversive “La La Land,” sketch on SNL.
I don’t have any illusions about billions of folks tuning into the Beards one day, for either the chef or, lol, journalism awards. But our food world is growing. And the foundation is continuing to widen its audience beyond chefs and cookbook authors and others who don’t actually need to google “what are the Beards.”
The Oscars lesson, for me, is that the Beards should expand their list of nominations too. I firmly believe that any award ceremony — or heck, any major listicle — is better off when it ignores the trappings of exclusivity and instead focuses on a nobler aim: showcasing more artists and authors.
A bigger bunch of awesome nominees in a category is always worth more to me than whoever ends up winning.
More nominees give more people a stake, just as Major League Baseball’s expanded playoffs gives additional cities a chance to rally around their team in the post-season. More nominees make for better debates over the dinner table because it gives us sharper insights into what a particular organization is trying to illustrate.
More nominees in a category make the actual honorees feel like they’re an essential part of our larger cultural zeitgeist, rather than elite members of a tiny club. And remember that a bigger pool of finalists ensured that when “Green Book” somehow won Best Picture in 2019 (ugh), we all got to watch fellow nominee Spike Lee (who directed the timely “BlackKkKlansman”) justifiably storm out on behalf of all of us.
A single win, I’ve always believed, doesn’t convey the same significance as a bunch of excellent works in conversation with (or in opposition to) one another. We might all go to a museum for an individual Rivera mural, but we end up staying for the larger exhibit filled with works by Siqueiros, Tamayo, Orozco, and others.
Maybe you care deeply about who Pete Wells named as the city’s best restaurant for two years in a row (it’s Tatiana, and it’s a great choice). But what I care more about is that he highlighted Kwame Onwuachi’s venue along with 99 other fine restaurants, a herculean task that gives readers so many interesting things to chat about — why Blanca debuted so high, why Txikito fell, why Cosme isn’t there.
Awards aren’t supposed to function like criticism or lists. They are, at their best, thoughtful or envelope-pushing distinctions. They’re not extended essays.
Yet still, if I were a Los Angeles resident who regularly read reviews by Bill Addison of the Los Angeles Times, I’d wonder why I should care about a ceremony where there’s just a single local chef competing in “Best Chef: California.” It’s a category with just five slots, with the rest of the entries represented by cities that L.A. residents don’t necessarily dine in on any regular basis (One could make that same argument with other cities, not all of which have as deep a stable of critics).
Food, after all, isn’t a subject where we can stream the honorees, a reality that makes regional and national awards at any publication or organization a touch more challenging to justify.
Or here’s another way to think about things: Regardless of what cooking reality competitions teach us, restaurants and journalism aren’t sports where there are true winners, verified by home runs, goals, missed penalties by the refs, or touchdowns. This isn’t the Super Bowl, where the losers apologize on television for letting their fans down after retreating to their locker room for a period of soul-searching (I’ve never understood that, but I guess that’s why I’m not a professional quarterback).
This is the Beards, where — like the Oscars — “losers” still go out and drink too many martinis with the folks who end up winning. That’s because this is hospitality. This is joy. This is writing. This is cooking. This is art. This is community. This is about the nominees. That’s the true honor.
But to build a better community and an awards show that more folks can feel invested in, sometimes you need a few extra nominations.
The James Beard Foundation, following a serious audit in the 2020s, has made impressive changes to broaden its awards portfolio, including the introduction of Emerging Voice medals and lowered entry fees (that are easily waived).
And this year, the “Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Review Award” has transformed into the “Criticism” award, “to better reflect the landscape of restaurant and food culture reviews and criticism.”
It’s a smart move, as some of sharpest thinking in the food world doesn’t always come from a small group of people who regularly review restaurants — a tough occupation to break into (I’ve been lucky in that regard). It also comes from a larger collection of correspondents, writers, independent publishers, and dessert journalists — many of whom regularly look beyond the four walls of a sit-down restaurant to tell us why something matters.
I’d love to see those type of folks — especially people who aren’t even allowed to review restaurants — nominated (and entered) in the criticism category as well.
The Beards should require every journalism entry to submit the work of a peer at another publication, newsletter, or blog, to help cast a wider net.
As I said before, it really amazes me that the Beards hold a ceremony for journalists in the first place — for journalists who cover and criticize restaurants. In that sense, these awards aren’t just like the Oscars, they’re also a bit like the Pulitzers.
Well, a little bit like the Pulitzers.
Consider the case of Jonathan Gold.
You can view his old archive on the LA Weekly website (as long as it’s extant). But if you want to try to understand why he became the only food critic to win the Pulitzer — though I can think of a few others deserving of that accolade — go check out his awards page, which includes the full text of his ten submissions. The Pulitzer committee does the exact same thing for finalists who don’t win, and include links to all the original published works.*
The Beard winners site simply lists the article headlines. No links. No nominees.
To be fair, I realize folks don’t kick off their loafers on Saturdays, sit in a leather armchair in Hudson with a shiba inu next to them, and spend a few hours reading the Pulitzer site like it was a crisp copy of The New Yorker.
But hear me out. We’re living in an era where some of the best journalism on any food website can disappear from the homepage after a day or so. This is a time when a long feature can vanish to page three of an author’s bio page in weeks. This is a world where finding the best stuff on the Internet is harder than it should be, especially as social sites deprioritize news.
The Beards could do a lot of good by doing the following on their awards page:
adding in links to the winning and nominated stories
listing the nominees alongside the winners, like other awards do
finding other ways to be a useful record of great writing
Full archiving is tough and expensive. But linking is not tough. Links are the are the backbone of good journalism. And they’re a canary in the coal mine of when good journalism disappears from the Internet, which it often does.
Or let me put it more directly: The Pultizer site feels designed for readers, for students, for journalists, for scholars. For people who want to learn. For people who want inspiration. For folks who get excited about seeing the stunning works of all the finalists — amazing writers like food critic Lyndsay C. Green and art critic Jason Farago — right next to whoever happens to win the big prize.
The Beards awards page feels like a list of winners designed to publicly announce that they are indeed winners. In that narrow sense, it succeeds.
But if winning is what we’re truly after, we’ve already lost.
It would be nice if the Beards conducted a true open call for journalism entries — as is the case for chef nominations, where suggestions are solicited from the public. Instead, authors and publications submit their own works.
Yes, this is how journalism awards typically function throughout the industry, and that’s too bad. It’s a system of institutional gatekeeping where entries are largely filtered through top editors at an organization — a policy that often favors senior writers — rather than coming organically from industry peers, readers, and elsewhere. Good journalism awards should find ways to flatten a masthead.
One last thing: let me give a shout out to “Made Here” the only self-published cookbook that received a nomination this year! My former Eater colleague, Nat Belkov, was the creative director. I’m also stoked to see so many of my Eater friends on the list of nominations, alongside other good folks like Abi Balingit, Helen Rosner, Daniela Galarza, Daniel Hernandez, José Ralat, and Sarah Perry, whose column for the independent Cake Zine was nominated for the prestigious MFK Fisher award.
I’m truly blown away that the Beards put so much effort into highlighting so many journalists and chefs across so many categories, but I still think we can find simple ways to showcase more voices that are often left out, especially within the categories.
Ryan Sutton is chief critic at The Lo Times, a 10-month old food media site. He was a longtime restaurant critic at Eater and Bloomberg. He is also an adjunct professor at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, where he has taught food writing and criticism since 2018. He formerly served as a judge for the Beard restaurants committee.
p.s. *The ASMEs are also great at linking to original works and using smart graphic design to get folks excited about the nominees, of which there are often five and sometimes seven per category.
p.p.s The Pulitzers could use more than three finalists per category!
This is such a great suggestion (upping the noms and submitting other writer's work). I remember going as a journalist to the JBF awards in the 90's. I was also working on broadway at the time as a dramaturg and used to joke that the awards show was so long and chaotic and boring that people would just leave and hang out with the chefs in the dining room - I wanted to direct the show! They are, however, putting on a pretty tight show these days. It's lovely to see how the awards and the foundation keep evolving. Some really smart, good people working there. Love your suggestions.