The moment the number of votes for Best Actor at the 38th Hundred Flowers Film Awards (China) was announced, the most notable number was not 48 winning votes of Yi Yangtianxi, but "0 votes" right after Wang Baoqiang's name.
This is the first time in 26 years of Wang Baoqiang's career that he has been nominated for Best Actor at Baihua Film Festival, with the role of A Gui in "Detective of Chinatown 1900" - a small character of the lower class, with few dialogues, mainly relying on eyes and delicate expressions to express his inner self - along with the movie with a box office revenue of more than 3.6 billion RMB.
4 years ago, Shen Teng was also nominated for the same category thanks to "I and my uncle" and received a 0-vote result. Now, Wang Baoqiang is once again replaying that "0-vote scenario".
According to the media, the Bach Hoa final round is decided by direct voting by 101 public judges with clear identities. They only evaluate the level of completion of the character in a specific work; there are no sympathy votes, nor are other achievements of the candidate considered.
However, "0 votes" and "few votes" are two different things. Jackie Chan received 2 votes, Liu Haoran received 1 vote, at least some people still remember them as competing candidates. Wang Baoqiang is the only one among the 6 candidates who did not receive any votes.
This shows that among 101 people, no one is willing to vote for the combination of "Wang Baoqiang + comedy + commercial film".
According to observers, the 3 major film awards of mainland China, Kim Ke, Bach Hoa and Hoa Bieu, seem to have a "respecting rank" that is not written in writing (ranked from high to low): drama - realistic topic - art film - thriller - comedy. Comedy films seem to always be at the bottom, followed by prejudices about comedians.
Tham Dang in "Mãn giang hồng" has regained his recklessness, in "Chào mừng đến nhà hàng Long" playing a chef caught up in the vortex of war, every small expression is handled accurately.
But in the minds of some people, there is a prejudice: "This is Thẩm Đằng, he himself already has a sense of humor". The appeal of the character is attributed to the personal temperament of the actor, while the sophistication in acting is seen as "acting true to himself".
With Vuong Bao Cuong, from the role of Son Can (movie Thien Ha Vo Tac), Duong Nhan (Detective of Chinatown) to now, audiences love him for his "simple, honest, naive" appearance. But for many judges, it is very difficult to separate the silence of A Quy (Detective of Chinatown 1900) from the image of "Vuong Bao Cuong in an honest style" to evaluate independently.
Wang Baoqiang's crazy performances in "Hello! Mr. Shu", which were once included in the curriculum of the Beijing Film Academy, when entering the Baihua race, may not overcome the thought: "He still acts like that".
The difficulty of comedy lies in the rhythm calculated in milliseconds, the way to hide segments without revealing traces, the fragile boundary between tragedy and comedy. But the unfortunate thing about comedy is that those skills are often "invisible" on the council's scoring board.
More ironically, the higher the box office revenue, the more difficult it seems to be for the work to win a prize.
Shen Teng has a total revenue of more than 40.8 billion RMB, Wang Baoqiang more than 20 billion RMB - they are all names that audiences "vote" for with each movie ticket. However, in many film awards, it is not a sign of "public recognition", but becomes elements such as "commercial", "popular", "pleasing the audience", "not high-class enough".
The full name of the Bach Hoa Award is Bach Hoa Public Cinema Award. The first round relied on popularity among the public to bring Vuong Bao Cuong to the final round, but the final round was assigned to 101 judges to vote secretly to decide.
From there, a rather ironic stratification appears: the audience is responsible for bringing that person into the race, while the judges are responsible for eliminating those who are loved by the audience.
When the results of an award named "popularity" deviate too far from the public's own perception, the prestige of the award itself is also questioned.
