This April, Venice International Film Festival director Alberto Barbera announced that this year’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement will be awarded to Roberto Benigni. The director and actor — best known outside of Italy for the Oscar-winning 1997 Holocaust comedy Life is Beautiful — will be awarded for his “innovative and irreverent approach to rules and traditions.”

There was a time when such a claim could have made sense. For much of his career, as well as being leftist in his politics — close to the Italian Communist Party (PCI) — Benigni was also artistically transgressive and inventive. Yet in the last twenty years he hasn’t been challenging rules or traditions, or been much of an innovator. Rather, he has obeyed pop culture conventions, becoming a rather flat and repetitive performer able to earn a lot of money without disturbing the expectations of his audience or, more importantly, the established powers that be.

So, why was he awarded the Golden Lion? The answer lies less in Benigni’s own lifetime achievements than in the political culture that surrounds the world of awards and film festivals.