That's the best way to do it. Otherwise all the money will go to the rich brat children of politicians/etc who are socially connected to whoever they put on the selection committees.
Rich parents are masters of helping their children exploit the system in as many of the thousands of ways that exist. A few hundred here, another hundred there, maybe some one-off thousands here.
In most of the world, rich people are rich because they are good at exploiting government funds. It's a lifestyle.
Mostly because the kind of people who run and advocate for programs like this are actively hostile to the idea of merit. Prioritizing talented people would be antithetical to them.
Prioritizing merit would be fine if there was some way to measure merit empirically, and if that measure couldn't be gamed by anybody with money and/or connections. But this is for artists, so...
And thinks that s/he's a winner and the stuff s/he enjoys is made by winners, and the stuff s/he doesn't like is made by losers. Merit, universal, objective = ME; Worthless, narcissistic, special interest = YOU.