The Feroz Awards are the statuettes awarded by the members of the Association of Cinematographic Informants of Spain, an entity that was born in 2013 with a clear objective: to become the Iberian equivalent of the Golden Globes, which allow foreign Hollywood journalists to Rub shoulders with the stars you admire (and interview). In their short history they have become an industry benchmark with a ceremony that, like the Globes, mixes journalists with the talent they have voted for. Of course, this does not mean that, like all awards, certain absences among the nominees often hurt.
This Thursday, when announcing the nominations for the best films and series of 2023, two series were positioned as clear favorites in the television categories. The Messiah by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi is the clear favorite for best drama series with 11 nominations including drama, screenplay, Ana Rujas, Lola Dueñas and Macarena García in leading actress, Roger Casamajor as leading actor, and Amaia Montero, Carmen Machi , Irene Balmes, Biel Rossell and Albert Pla in the secondary categories. Poquita fe de Montero y Maidagán, on the other hand, is the one who leads among the comedy series with six nominations: comedy, screenplay, Esperanza Pedreño as best actress, Raúl Cimas as best actor and Julia De Castro and Chani Martín as supporting actors.
To doubt these candidates, in the opinion of yours truly, would be to deny some of the most outstanding artistic successes of this season. It should also be mentioned that, apart from recognizing the media success of The Body on Fire, voters have remembered the authorial and meta-television game of Selftape by Joana and Mireia Vilapuig, they have dared with a romantic comedy like Citas Barcelona and, taking advantage of the fact that is in full promotion, have opted for Això not in Suècia. So what are the glaring absences? Let yourself be seen and the second season of Cardo.
In the case of Cardo by Ana Rujas and Clàudia Costafreda, perhaps it has to do with the fact that the first season was awarded in 2022 with the award for best drama series and best actress for Ana Rujas. The lack of the novelty factor seems to have played a trick on him, just like the (nominated) presence of Rujas in La Mesías or that it is produced by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi (and, when voting for a series from his production company, this time it was time a vote of concentration in her x-ray on the perversion of faith and toxic motherhood). But oblivion, in a way, also indicates an inertia not so much based on quality as on rewarding the new because, if we talk about Cardo, fiction took a qualitative leap that was believed impossible.
After exposing the anxiety associated with addiction through all the aspects that the audiovisual offers, the character of María played by Rujas starred in another trip to hell marked by legal narcotics and an omnipresent anxiety in a character with a desire for rehabilitation. The six episodes were a narrative but also sensory experience in which it could be interpreted as a face to face with The Messiah as the most total and suffocating works of recent television. (And, in order to award singers like Amaia Romero, voters could have written in the name of Diego Ibáñez, the singer of Carolina Durante, who had a similar magnetism in Cardo.)
And, even more painful for not having been recognized before and being a very personal bet, it seems incredible that Let yourself be seen was ignored by an association delighted with the idea of ??voting for the coolest. Álvaro Carmona, who had explored television creation with a short format like People Speaking, was exalted as a creator with a conceptual comedy about an artist, Ana (Macarena Sanz), who was beginning to disappear.
She should not be nominated because she was dystopian, because she understood our relationship with social networks or scathingly criticized the art world, but because she emerged victorious in her approach to conceptual humor. Let Yourself See is a genius of rarity that portrays any artistic sector and any contemporary human being, and that possibly should be exported because, just as Carmona was looking for, it does not look like any other series.
Among the justifications for this absence, the journalist Daniel Mantilla and member of the Association of Cinematographic Informants of Spain regretted that Atresplayer had barely promoted it for the Feroz. It also did not go unnoticed that Movistar monopolized 25 of the 33 nominations in television fiction, which he analyzed in this way: “There are several explanations for this. There is some snobbery (these are the series that go to film festivals), but also worrying about their series being seen (they put them in their entirety so that voters can see them, others).”
Therefore, those series that manage to be seen by film journalists have a better chance of entering the nominations, as do those that are more accessible and receive clearer support from their channels or platforms. Atresmedia missed the mark by betting on Tefía’s Nights, which had to settle for the nomination of Patrick Criado. But shouldn’t some awards voted for by the press and critics have memory and a critical spirit before falling into the current campaign? Perhaps it would be time for the association to divide the vote between television journalists and film journalists?