The Crunchyroll Anime Awards happened recently. While the notion of an ‘anime award show’ seems like a novel thing to do, other industries have their own award shows, so it makes sense for anime to have their own as well. However, Crunchyroll’s production enters similar pitfalls as other award shows: bias. Their problem arises from the moment you see the results, the winners are predictable due to the judges’ bias.
The primary issue with “The Anime Awards” comes down to the cluster of judges Crunchyroll corralled to do the job. Winners are decided by a 70:30 split, with the judges representing the 70% and the viewer voting accounting for 30%. Understandably, this process is needed so it doesn't become a popularity contest. However, it still ends up being just that due to the judges selected.
Given that the judges are content creators, we can easily glean how their opinions will sway. If we take into account that content creators will produce content about popular media in order to gain traction, it makes their judging disingenuous to the media actually nominated. Despite gathering creators with diverse backgrounds, they don't select content creators with diverse enough palates in media that they themselves consume.
A possible solution could be to instead scout anime directors, voice actors (from any language widely spoken), and animators to judge the award show. This way the nominees and winners hold more weight because actual industry professionals are helping curate and decide winners. Additionally, industry professionals are more removed from public bias. This helps to mitigate upset fans, since average anime fans don't know the tastes of these individuals in the industry unless they post on social media, are featured in editorial write-ups, guest on podcasts, etc.
Granted, there will never be a perfect way to do awards shows. Problems will always crop up despite the actions of Sony or Crunchyroll. However, there are glaringly obvious and reasonable steps that they could take to improve the quality of “The Anime Awards.” If those behind the production want to be taken as seriously as “The Oscars,” they need to take a page from their screenplay and consider seasoned industry veterans as judges instead, lest they end up like the predictable sensory circus that is “The Game Awards.”