All awards are arbitrary, at least to some degree.
It's important to remember that unlike the Tony Awards, which consider 4-5 nominees across two-dozen categories, one Pulitzer Prize is issued, and the choice is made from more than a hundred candidates. Also, because the committee is always in flux, it is definitely subject to the whims of whoever happens to have a seat on the committee at a given point. And at the end of the day, the Pulitzer judges have the final word, which is how a work like Next to Normal can win the prize without even being among the finalists.
Arbitrary? Of course. But that's the nature of awards in general.
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body
