What They Don't Tell You About Winning Film Awards (But I Will)

The first thing nobody tells you about winning a film award is that the actual moment of victory is weirdly anticlimactic.

You spend months, sometimes years building up to this moment in your head. You practice acceptance speeches in the shower. You imagine the validation, the vindication, the career-changing phone calls that will surely follow.

Then your name gets called (or in most cases you get an email a month in advance. We're not talking Oscars here), you walk up to collect your trophy, and mostly what you feel is relief that you didn't trip on the stairs.

Don't get me wrong, winning awards is fantastic. But the gap between expectation and reality is vast enough to drive a small vehicle through.

Here's what actually happens: You get a nice piece of hardware that looks impressive on your shelf and hopefully makes your parents and partner proud. You get a brief moment of recognition from your peers. You get some social media congratulations and a few industry publications mention your name. Then, approximately 72 hours later, everyone moves on to the next thing, and you're back to the same fundamental challenge you had before: figuring out how to make your next project happen.

The dirty secret about awards is that they're much better at recognizing work you've already done than they are at helping you do new work. That trophy doesn't make financing easier to secure, scripts easier to write, or collaborators easier to find. It's a lovely validation of past achievement, not a magical key to future success.

I learned this the hard way after my first significant award win. I naively expected my phone to start ringing. Investors, opportunities, agents etc. Instead, what I got was a slightly more impressive bio line and the same uphill battle to get people interested in my next project.

The award opened a few doors, but I still had to walk through them myself and prove I deserved to be there.

The psychology of winning is also more complex than anyone admits. There's an immediate high, followed by a weird emptiness. You've achieved something you've been working toward, and suddenly you need new goals. Some winners describe a mild depression that follows major recognition, the "What now?" syndrome that comes when you realize that achieving your dreams doesn't fundamentally change who you are or solve your deeper creative challenges.

Then there's the pressure that comes with recognition. Before you win awards, you're just trying to make good work. After you win awards, you're trying to make work that's worthy of someone who wins awards. It's a subtle but significant psychological shift that can actually make creating more difficult.

The networking aspects are both the most valuable and most exhausting parts of award shows. These events are essentially professional conferences disguised as celebrations. Everyone is working, making connections, pitching projects, maintaining relationships. The conversations are simultaneously genuine and strategic. People are happy for your success, but they're also wondering what it might mean for them.

Awards ceremonies themselves are endurance tests masquerading as parties. They're long, often poorly paced, and involve a lot of sitting still while trying to look engaged and grateful. The food is usually mediocre (they're feeding hundreds of people simultaneously), the audio is frequently problematic, and you spend most of your time watching other people get recognition for their work, which requires a constant balance between genuine happiness for colleagues and management of your own competitive feelings.

The politics are real but less dramatic than people imagine. Awards aren't purely merit-based, they involve campaign strategies, industry relationships, timing, and a dozen other factors that have nothing to do with the quality of your work. Understanding this can be either liberating (your work's value isn't determined by whether it wins awards) or frustrating (recognition isn't always aligned with achievement).

Here's what I wish someone had told me. Awards are wonderful when they happen, but they're terrible goals to organize your creative life around. They're too unpredictable, too dependent on factors outside your control, and too disconnected from the actual satisfaction of making good work.

The real reward isn't the trophy, it's the moment during production when you realize you're capturing exactly what was in your head, or when an audience responds to your work in ways that surprise and move you, or when a collaborator brings something to your project that makes it better than you imagined it could be.

Awards recognize these moments after the fact, which is lovely. But they can't create them, and they can't guarantee they'll happen again.

The most successful award winners I know treat recognition as a pleasant surprise rather than a primary motivation. They make work they're passionate about, try to get it seen by the right audiences, and let the awards fall where they may. When recognition comes, they're gracious and grateful. When it doesn't, they keep working.

So if you're working toward awards, enjoy the process, celebrate if you win, learn from the experience regardless of the outcome. But remember that the real prize is becoming the kind of creator whose work is worthy of recognition, whether or not that recognition actually arrives.

The trophies on my shelf are nice. But the skills, relationships, and experiences I gained making the work that earned it. Those are the things that actually changed my life.