Well, the problem with awards is that it's impossible to make everyone happy. To put it bluntly, you either wind up with a bunch of experts who attempt to objectively evaluate the medium in question, with results that will frequently get the every man to scratch their heads while screaming about pretentiousness, or a kind of populist "what's cool at the moment" poll-a-thon dominated by the lowest human denominator. Increasingly, most awards systems wind up making nobody happy by trying to walk between the two extremes, with more of an increasing lean towards the lowest human denominator because in the end the point increasingly comes down to a show being put on, and looking to their approval.
Honestly I think for any kind of an awards system to be taken seriously, it needs to be divorced from the public spectacle. When this kind of thing becomes TOO public, it destroys any integrity that the awards had to begin with (with anything from movie, to music, to now games), which is what got people interested to begin with.
I honestly think awards systems are a good way to guide the progression of their respective industries, and acknowleged actual achievement when it happens. Of course I also think that as a part of this there should not be a definate aware being handed out in each catagory each year, only the potential for one, and entire catagories of acknowlegement should be skipped if nobody does anything meaningful to progress the medium as a whole. I think one of the problem with awards in general nowadays is that no matter the media, it typically comes down to deciding what piece of mass market consumer dog poop actually stinks less, when little is created that is going to have any kind of lasting impact.
See, I'm of the opinion that the guys doing the awards for video games should be similar to me, not so much in their actual opinion, but in having a depth of knowledge about gaming, and a willingness to put new creations into perspective. I'd have no problem not giving any awards if there were no games worthy of them in a given year. I also have no problem with sitting back and pointing out when I think a game doesn't deserve as much praise as it's getting because someone did the same basic thing, better, decades beforehand, but just didn't have as pretty graphics attached to it. I'd also think that any "toolbox" game that is developed by using a pre-made engine with new graphics stuck onto it and a frew tweaks should be omitted because there is little actual game design there at all. One of the reasons why so many games play the same way is because they use the same exact code. As far as I'm concerned you can pretty much review "game made with the Unreal engine" once, and award it fairly once. If I'm sitting down trying to compare 2-3 games all developed from the same toolbox, I'd pretty much just lob them all into the waste bin collectively.
Of course this pretty much makes me similar to what "The Academy" has been for movies for a long time (though that has been changing as time goes on). A perfectly entertaining popcorn flick that is popular with the everyman, getting trashed or not even considered because in the big picture (going back to probably before a lot of people watching the current movies were born) they objectively weren't anything special.
Maybe at some point my opinion will change, but honestly I think the problem with almost all video game awards systems right now is that it's pretty much a bunch of promotion and backpatting, there isn't really anyone evaluating video games as an art form or holding what's being made now up against what has been made before. In looking at games one has to look at the gameplay, writing, and actual mechanics of the thing, not nessicarly at how pretty the game is graphically. It's sort of like how with movies The Academy tends not to be heavily swayed by special FX, which might wow audience, but have little to do with the actual quality of the film, how it's put together, or the performances within it. Simply put if you can take a game made now and put it up against a game that was made for the Commodore 64 and find that it has inferior gameplay, design, pacing, etc... it deserves to get panned because it's simply very pretty... and just as there are catagories for looking good for movies, doubtlessly graphics and art direction would be it's own singular catagory.
A lot of rambling, but such are my thoughts.
