Accent on positivity
Okay, this year I am not even going to pretend that I tried not to write about the Golden Globes. They have won, and I have lost. Somehow the Globes have become part of the annual awards season narrative and must be treated credibly even though there is no logical reason why they should be. See my rant from last year for a quick refresher on why the Globes are a joke. (Short version: they are voted on by some infinitesimally small number of journalists most people have never heard of.) Yet I read serious commentators who opine that the Golden Globes are better than the Oscars, at least as an award show. Well, yeah, that’s probably true. Or at least it used to be.
The fact that the Globes should not matter but they do anyway was always mitigated by the fact that they were at least fun to watch. Once again allow me to invoke Ricky Gervais as a past host and his legendary assaults on propriety, the business, and on the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which just seemed to be happy to be mentioned, regardless of how insulting the context. There was—and still is—a party atmosphere as opposed to the taking-themselves-way-too-seriously tone of the Academy Awards ceremony. Then the crusader-ism that had long infected most other Hollywood events found its way into the Globes. Last year Seth Meyers was dismal as the unlucky MC who had to figure out how to navigate the wreckage in the wake of Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey. This year they came up with Andy Samberg and Sandra Oh, who were a bit of a strange match but who are at least generally likeable. The running gag—actually the only gag—of the night was how nice and positive everything was going to be. In other words, the trappings of irony without any of the actual irony.
They were not exactly the worst thing I have seen on an awards show, but they did inadvertently raise the awkward question: Why do awards shows need hosts anyway? Answer No. 1: Because some year you might hit it lucky (or interesting) and get Billy Crystal (or Ricky Gervais). Answer No. 2: Actually, they probably don’t. It kind of looks like the Oscars are heading the way of having no host since the debacle of Kevin Hart being asked to host, then told to make abject apologies for years-old tweets, then refusing to make the kind of apology that was asked for and then turning the job down again just recently. I cannot say I blame him or, for that matter, anyone else who declines to take that gig given what a political hot potato it has become. There is something jarring about the huge disconnect between the moralistic/litmus-test-imposing nature of vetting the Oscar host job and the behavior that is known to have been encouraged and tolerated for years among many of Hollywood’s high-earning darlings—not to mention the actual content of many Hollywood’s high-grossing and critically favored films. Hypocrisy much?
Okay, so back to Sunday’s ceremony. Maybe I am becoming a cranky old codger, but I keep finding that the highlight is when they bring out someone really old. Last year it was Kirk Douglas (still around, by the way, at 102) and Carol Burnett (now a mere 85). Burnett was again a highlight if only for the look on her face when she saw Dick Van Dyke (currently 93) up on the stage with Emily Blunt and he name-checked her by saying that he actually saw someone in the audience he knew.
Will any viewers get the same lump in their throat in 2069 when Christian Bale hobbles out onto the stage to present an award for the latest Batman movie? Who knows, but I doubt it. Bale got noticed for the one serious breach of the apparent no-politics rule, but then he was after all accepting his acting award for playing a cartoon version of Dick Cheney that was apparently aimed at squarely at the Democratic-voter demographic. In case there was any doubt, he made a point of thanking Satan “for giving me inspiration for playing this role.” That earned an appreciative tweet from @ChurchofSatan, but most of the twitterverse seemed more preocuppied with the sudden discovery that Bale is British. Strangely, the chameleon-like actor (born in Wales to English parents), who has convincingly played Americans for years, sounded fake and unconvincing to many people as he rambled on in an accent that people who know Britspeak better than I said was Dorset. This a mere ten years after the time people were totally confused when the actor went into a completely over-the-top rant on the set of Terminator Salvation directed at a poor director of photography who had the misfortune to walk into his eyeline during a scene. The confusion that time was over the fact that Bale, in a presumably spontaneous and emotional outburst, screamed the entire rant in his character’s American accent.
If there was a highlight to Sunday’s expensive self-congratulation party it was Jeff Bridges’s acceptance of the Cecil B. DeMille Award. For one thing, the video clips of his career, featuring so many movies we had forgotten he was in (The Last Picture Show, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Heaven’s Gate, Tron and its sequel, Against All Odds, Starman, The Fabulous Baker Boys, The Fisher King, Crazy Heart and True Grit, not to mention appearing on his dad’s TV show Sea Hunt and of course his career-defining turn in The Big Lebowski), was delightful exercise in nostalgia. His speech, if you can call it that, gave every indication of being thought up and spoken on the spur of the moment and, because of that, utterly sincere and heartfelt. Bridges has his own wonderfully idiosyncratic philosophy, and its appeal is that it is full of the kind of unadulterated positivity that is refreshing because it is not aimed at trying to make someone else feel guilty. How has this man managed to work and flourish for more than six decades in Hollywood?
So now that we have seen the Golden Globes, there is no reason to watch the Oscars, right? After all, what could the more-than-6,000 members of the Academy of Motion Pictures know that the 90 members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assocation do not?
-S.L., 10 January 2018
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