There are, of course, many reasons to hate the Ballon d'Or
award, many of them robust and persuasive. Most obviously there
is the basic problem with all awards ceremonies, the paralysis
of inauthenticity that inevitably overwhelms all human beings
present, driven at the top end by the necessity to appear both
humble and magnanimous in victory, and below this by the
spectacle of your peers being publicly celebrated, an experience
that must out of necessity induce very human feelings of shock,
hurt, revulsion, impotence and creeping death.  Many such
terrible moments are standard issue across any awards ceremony:
from people at adjacent tables who leap up and do look-at-my-
extrovert-humility applause when someone else wins something, to
any kind of soulful filmic montage along the those-not-as-
fortunate-as-us lines, to the moment just before a really big
award envelope is opened where the host must lower his voice and
adopt an expression of transcendental yearning reminiscent of
the Nazis at the end of Raiders