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Personally, I love lists, and awards are definitely lists.
I specifically read all of the Hugo winners a few years ago, and am slowly trying (aka failing) to do the same with the BSFA at the moment. (I was also sort of attempting to do the Locus SF, since I was only missing a few, but last year's winner made me lose the impetus.)
When I'm browsing through crime fiction - a genre I am less at home in - I do find an award nomination or win to be a sign that this book has something going for it.
I also kind of like to try to read something from a literary short-list every now and again. I'm reading Booker-winner Wolf Hall right now. It's good. Also long, and a bit weird.
I guess I'm saying that I do care about awards. Obviously, if an award consistently lets me down, I will stop caring about it, but I feel that they give you a kind of focus. If there's a big stack of indistinguishable books, and one has "Winner of the Mobilereads Award" on it, then that is at least a good place to start looking. Other people are likely to have read it. We can discuss whether it was good or not, whether those Mobilereads voters were a bunch of idiots or not.
I did/do care about the Hugo award. The list of best novel winners form a reasonably decent canon; a fairly good backbone of SF, with few real duffers. I've voted, for the last few years, and nominated for the last two. I'm not bothering this year, because a small group of politically-motivated idiots have come in and smashed the place up*. That's certainly one way to stop me caring about it, and - while I'm a little sad that it might just wither away, given its history - it doesn't really make much difference in the end. I'm still going to be able to find the kinds of books I like. These days it's easier than ever.
*The best novel ballot is probably still going to be OK. I already own the three non-gamed finalists, and honestly probably wouldn't hate the other two (the Marko Kloos book that was withdrawn was actually the only one I'd read).
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