A Cozy Awards Night

There was something refreshingly intimate about the Jupiter Awards ceremony last night in Berlin—the kind of event where you could actually have a conversation instead of just working the room. Out of half a million votes, they picked Elyas M’Barek and Emilia Schüle as the year’s best actors. M’Barek won for Fack Ju Göhte 3, which also took best German film. Both deserved it.

What mattered more was that Dark and 4 Blocks took best TV series. I’ve watched both enough to know they’re genuinely strange and uncompromising—serious work that doesn’t apologize for being itself. German television has been quietly making some of the most interesting stuff anywhere, and it’s still rare to see that recognized by actual audiences instead of critics. The ceremony apparently had the right energy for it: intimate enough to feel genuine, but still a real celebration.

I don’t think much about what these awards mean to the industry, but there’s something true about half a million people voting and saying yeah, we want more of this. That’s the only vote that actually counts.