The Las Culturistas Culture Awards, hosted by Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers, is moving to the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn for its third annual show satirizing and celebrating moments in culture that could only be dreamt up on their podcast.
The ceremony, which will take place June 15, typically consists of 100 categories brainstormed by Yang and Rogers, with some mainstays including record of the year and the Cate Blanchett award for good acting. The “fake awards show” is meant to poke fun at the big awards shows of the year and has included musical performances, celebrity appearances and video acceptance speeches from the likes of Blanchett (a winner in her own category) and Taylor Swift (a two-time winner, including in the category of Best Taylor Swift).
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As for whether Swift could be a participant in this year’s ceremony, Rogers and Yang are leaving the option open.
“If she wants to send in a video that would be great. Our message to her and [her publicist] Tree Paine is ‘Help us, help you. Play ball.’ But she may not be in her sending-videos-to-fake-awards-shows era any more,” Rogers said.
The idea for the show started as a running joke made by Yang, a Saturday Night Live castmember, and Rogers, a star of Fire Island alongside Yang and of the comedy special Have You Heard of Christmas?, on their popular podcast Las Culturistas. It turned into a reality once Lincoln Center reached out with an option to use the stage at their outdoor space in Damrosch Park, and the two partnered with producer Lauren Mandel and her company, Disco Nap, to build out the show.
The ceremony was hosted at the Lincoln Center for the past two years and welcomed 2,600 attendees, cheering on the winners of categories such as best skill to have (winner: a sense of play) and the Shiv Roy award for best fake accent (Melanie Lynskey, all) and attendees including D’Arcy Carden and the band Muna. But after a nearby thunderstorm threatened to delay or cancel last year’s ceremony, the decision was made to move venues and make it “a full awards show experience,” Yang said.
“We are moving indoors so that people can enjoy upholstered seating, finally. I think people are too used to uncomfortable posterior resistance. I think they’re used to hard plastic chairs. Since our bar basement days, we have not given them a full awards show experience. And we are aiming to give that holistic packaging of being an honest-to-goodness awards show,” Yang said.
The past ceremonies had been free to attend, which drew in more fans, but also led to some capacity issues. This time the event will be ticketed, with a presale April 3 at 10 a.m. ET for Las Culturistas listeners, a Live Nation presale April 4 at 10 a.m. ET and general ticket sales April 5 at 10 a.m. ET.
While the programming for the awards show changes yearly, Yang and Rogers traditionally perform a big opening number and include performances of all the record of the year nominees. The show also includes tongue-in-check references to moments in awards shows that preceded it, with Rogers pointing to the repetition of winners this year as a possibility, and Yang calling out the “endless” debate over whether or not to have hosts.
“The fact that all the awards shows seem to come within six weeks, I thought, made it really funny to see the same people win over and over and over and over and over and over again,” Rogers said. “It really just felt like six or seven people were given a lot of time and to watch them try and make their speeches special and different each and every time was a thrill.”
Added Yang, “I feel like we kind of ran the gamut this past year in terms of hosts that left more to be desired or hosts that really knocked it out of the park, and I feel like we can all agree that Aidy Bryant [who hosted the Film Independent Spirit Awards] was the best of the best.”
The attendee list for this year’s show has not yet been confirmed, but Yang says they’ve laid the groundwork for potential appearances by Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager (and they’ve released a promotional video with The Traitors‘ Parvati Shallow). All winners are determined by Rogers and Yang, but the two hint that, like with Swift, they could be swayed by who decides to participate. They also invite their podcast listeners to launch public campaigns for their choices.
“I think campaigns have really tipped the scales in a perfectly reasonable way that we celebrate, that we really love. It’s what awards are all about. It’s about passion and money and volume,” Yang said.
Yang and Rogers joke that they’ll continue hosting until Glenn Close or Amy Adams wins and accepts a Culture Award onstage (“Her and the aliens from Arrival, skinny legends,” Rogers adds) but even then, the two hosts say they may want to continue.
“We can’t see the future, but I think what we can see so far is that we have no intention of stopping. And that is a threat,” Rogers said.
