Harry Styles and the rise of the 'apology' acceptance speech.

Harry Styles is sorry. 

He's sorry that his album is so successful. That his sold-out world tour has been going on for almost a year.

He's sorry that 'As It Was' is so damn catchy. That his fashion sense confuses you. 

He's sorry that he's the best example since Justin Timberlake of an artist whose talent transcended their boy-band beginnings.

He's sorry that everyone on the planet finds him so damn irresistible and mostly he's sorry that this year – 2023 – has been his year at awards shows on both sides of the Atlantic ocean. 

Because in 2023, there is nothing more certain than that [insert your award show of choice] will make the wrong decision. And someone like Harry Styles will benefit. 

Watch Harry Styles perform 'As It Was' live at Coachella. Post continues after video.

In case you missed it, Harry Styles had to be sorry because last week he won a Grammy.

That night a lot of excellent musicians won Grammys in what is, let's be honest, a completely subjective and political contest that pits music against music. As if it is empirically inarguable which music lights you up, makes you happy, makes you cry, and makes you dance around the kitchen.

Lizzo won one. Beyoncé won one. Adele won one. How you choose a worthy winner of anything between those three women is entirely unclear, but that's the system we're going with so... lean in. 

Taylor Swift won one. Kendrick Lamar. Bonnie Raitt. Samara Joy. 

Nile Rodgers won a lifetime achievement award. So did Nirvana. 

Ozzy Osbourne (checks notes), yes, Ozzy Osbourne, won a Grammy that night. 

The most newsworthy thing that happened at the ceremony was that Beyoncé become the most nominated and awarded artist in all of Grammys history. 

And the next most newsworthy thing was that Harry, who won Album of The Year for Harry's House, said something wrong in his acceptance speech.

After acknowledging the other nominees he said: “This doesn’t happen to people like me very often and this is so, so nice. Thank you very much.”

'People like me' was enough to send the Internet into a frenzy. People 'like' Harry Styles have won plenty of Grammys, after all, if we're defining 'people like me' to mean straight white men. Because let's be honest, they win lots of things. All the time. 

So what did he mean? Was he referencing his much-questioned queerness? Did he mean non-nepo babies? People from "ordinary" families like his, who grew up in "ordinary" suburbs? Did he mean exceptionally good-looking pin-ups who sprung from reality talent shows? 

Listen to this episode of Mamamia Out Loud, where the host discuss Harry Styles. Post continues after podcast.

The storm was wild enough to warrant an apology of sorts when this weekend, he won again. 

At the Brit Awards, in London, Harry Styles cleaned up. He won four, including Album Of The Year, Song Of The Year and Artist of The Year. 

It was, without question, Harry's year. 

And this time, he knew what to say. "I'm really, really grateful for this and I'm very aware of my privilege up here tonight," he said, before listing off the names of the female artists who weren't nominated for any Brits this year. 

Phew. Crisis averted. Harry's aware of his privilege, so 'people like me' can be forgotten. Harry signalled that the women should have won, not him, so he's ticked an activist box that was left glaringly empty. 

Except it wasn't. 

Harry Styles' activist box was shaded in long ago. 

His is the kind of progressive CV that is applauded in a small-l liberal pop icon: Last year, Styles donated $1 million to Everytown for Gun Safety, an anti-gun charity, after the cold-blooded murder of 19 children in Uvalde, Texas. He was vocal about the overturning of Roe, calling it "a dark day for America". At his concerts last year, he was loud about supporting the widespread protests in Iran, after the murder of Mahsa Amini. He's sold Pride shirts at his merch stands with all profits going LGBTQI+ non-profit organisations. He has been an ambassador for charities as diverse as Alzheimers Society, Amnesty International and the Born This Way foundation. 

In fact, his progressive credentials are so ubiquitous that he's sometimes called out as performative for even speaking about them.

"I'm aware that as a white male, I don't go through the same things as a lot of the people that come to the shows," he has said. "I can't claim that I know what it's like, because I don't. So I'm not trying to say, 'I understand what it's like'. I'm just trying to make people feel included and seen."

Still, it's not enough. When it comes to awards shows, a win for Harry is a loss for someone else who deserved it more, because of who they are.

As if we know every facet of who Harry Styles is. 

What we do know is that here is a person who's challenging traditional views of masculinity. An artist who uses his platform to promote worthwhile causes, a man who straddles both critical acclaim and popular success. A man who wrote a song that stayed at number one for 15 weeks straight. 

In a complicated era, awards shows have never been harder to get "right". The Grammys can award everyone from Ozzy to Lizzo, and still three words spouted from a podium can chase a young man around the Internet until he's forced to give an 'aw shucks not me' acceptance speech from another podium at another award show to set things right. 

Is it Harry Styles who's performative, or is it the idea that there could ever be a perfect winner in an imperfect world? 

It's hard to imagine that five years from now awards shows will exist. Over and again we've seen behind the curtain at how the sausage is made. Campaigns with presidential-sized budgets for the Oscars. The soulless back-scratching bullshit of the Golden Globes-deciding Foreign Press Association. The nonsense of "peer voting categories" when all your "peers" are white, awarded themselves and have vested interests up to their eyeballs. 

That sound you can hear is Cate Blanchett rehearsing her Oscar speech, after calling the Critics Choice Awards a "patriarchal pyramid" and suggesting her gong should have gone to... everyone else. 

If every winner has to acknowledge in one breath that they don't deserve to win and in the next thank everyone very much for giving it to them, the entire exercise begins to lose its shine. 

But even among all this soul-searching you would think there was one thing we could all agree on...

'As It Was' is a banger. 

Image: Getty.