You can't win a competition without entering it.

You have better than zero in a trillion odds against Lebron James. What if his phone rings?

"10 Hollywood directors" is hilariously unconstrained -- I'd put money on at least one having never seen The Godfather.

> The reasonable naive expectation for contests like these is that, below a certain bar of quality, the chance of win is 0.

I agree that the layperson's understanding of what 'literary award' means is close to this idea, but the "contests like these" is the problem here. "contests like these" include one that allows and seems extremely keen on "AI" generated text, for example.

There isn't a stark contrast between 'contest of skill' and 'game of chance'. You can eliminate the skill part and get closer to pure random chance, but you can't eliminate the random chance from the contest of skill.