Golden gobsmacking
I think I have finally made my peace with the absurdity of the Golden Globes. And it’s about time. After all, I have been dealing with this problem ever since I first started writing about the Globes way back in 2001 and then continued to write about them annually ever since—despite each time swearing I was never going to pay attention to them ever again.
To recap (yet again), my problem with the Golden Globes is that they are treated as though they are somehow important and significant when there is no logical reason that they should be. Unlike the Academy Awards, the Emmys and the various guild awards, the Globes are not voted on by members of the filmmaking professions—unless you count journalism as being a filmmaking profession. And unlike other major awards, the Globes are voted on not by hoards of the nominees’ peers but by a scant 90 people, i.e. the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. And who are these people? An article last year on the Refinery29 web site helpfully shed some light on who they are. At that time the organization’s president was Meher Tatna of India. Its vice-president was Anke Hofman of Germany. Its treasurer was Ali Sar of Russia. Its executive secretary was Janet Nepales of the Philippines. Household names all.
“But who’s actually in the group?” asked the article’s author Elena Nicolaou. “In 2015, Vulture tracked down most of the members in the HFPA. They range from widely read journalists like Ramzi Malouki to people like Alena Prime of Tahiti, whose bylines are not available online.”
Do you see the problem? I am willing to give the HFPA the benefit of the doubt and concede that they are probably all—or at least mostly—fine people and perhaps even fine writers about cinema. Also it should be noted that the HFPA is a non-profit organization that does worthy charitable work, including using the proceeds from their annual awards broadcast to fund scholarships and grants and also film restoration. But why should their opinion matter any more than people who actually work in the film industry or, for that matter, the vaster community of film critics in general including, ahem, film bloggers?
Yet as the earliest broadcast “major” awards show of each year, the HFPA’s nominations and winners get huge media attention—in addition to minor media attention from the likes of me in spite of myself.
So what’s my solution? Well, whatever it is, it appears that ignoring the Golden Globes in January is not an option. I actually did not plan to watch them this year because we were meant to be away in an even more isolated part of Ireland than where we usually live. But our plans were delayed by a day and we wound up watching them anyway, as usual in the edited version shown internationally the evening after the event in our time zone. By then, not watching was not an option because of all the media fuss about Ricky Gervais.
If you look at the Golden Globes as a fundraising event for charitable causes rather than a proper film-and-TV awards program, then it kind of makes more sense. Sort of like watching Jerry Lewis telethons or the Red Nose broadcast on BBC. The point is not who wins awards and who loses. The point is to watch and laugh and help raise the ratings numbers in order to generate more ad revenue which can, in turn, be donated to scholarships, grants and film restoration.
When you look at it that way, you also solve the conundrum of why they keep inviting Gervais back to host. After all, his main shtick is to constantly insult the people who have employed him as well as the people the event is meant to be honoring. Now the lightbulb finally illuminates my head. And after two decades, it’s damn well about time. It’s not at all about the movies and the actors and the directors. It’s about laughing at them—all the way to the bank.
So as someone who fancies himself a writer about film, the solution is obvious. Do not treat these awards as anything serious or meaningful about cinema and television. Just concentrate on the entertainment spectacle of the awards ceremony itself.
The funny thing is that, while watching Gervais’s rantings, I actually had the strange sensation of hearing the death knell of Hollywood self-congratulatory award ceremonies. This time he actually crossed the line between traditional insult humor and that thing that Hollywood types like to think they are doing when they really aren’t: speaking truth to power. Yes, there were lots of gratuitous and jaw-dropping swipes at everyone from Leonardo DiCaprio to James Corden to Felicity Huffman and even (gasp!) Dame Judi Dench’s, er, um, minge.
The audience shots of Tom Hanks (valiantly fighting a winter virus) looking shocked and horrified left me wondering whether he was genuinely appalled at the insults or whether he was gamely playing into the bit. In any event, the redeeming thing about the ceremony was seeing Hanks and Ellen DeGeneres—two actually genuinely nice people—receive lifetime awards.
But back to the more important business of the evening’s character assassination. What really wounded were the quips that were only funny in the darkest way. Like when Gervais said to an audience that included Tim Cook, “Apple roared into the TV game with The Morning Show, a superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing—made by a company that runs sweatshops in China. You say you’re woke, but the companies you work for, I mean, unbelievable: Apple, Amazon, Disney. If ISIS started a streaming service, you’d call your agent, wouldn’t you?”
He added, “So if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech, right? You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg. So, if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your god and f*** off.”
As it happened, most of the preaching from presenters and recipients had to do with the fires in Australia, which even Gervais had to get on board with. Yet when Michelle Williams accepted her award and used the opportunity to establish her pro-choice-on-abortion bona fides, it felt like some of the ground had definitely been dug out from underneath her.
The host even managed to turn a shameless plug for his own show into a poison-laced zinger. He suggested that, instead of watching the Golden Globes, people could “binge watch the entire first season of Afterlife. That’s a show about a man who wants to kill himself after his wife dies of cancer. It has a second season though, so he obviously doesn’t kill himself in the end—just like Jeffrey Epstein.” Anticipating the audience’s groans, he quickly added, “Shut up, I don’t care. I know he was your friend.”
Now that was a shot that hit too close to home. Gervais’s most devastating shot, however, was his almost-parting one. He introduced Sandra Bullock by saying, “Our next presenter starred in Netflix’s Bird Box, a movie where people survive by acting like they don’t see a thing. Sort of like working for Harvey Weinstein.” Again anticipating the hostile reaction, he said, “You did it! I didn’t, you did it!”
The actual parting shot? “Have a great time. Get drunk. Take your drugs,”
It’s kind of as though Gervais had pulled back the curtain on the fake wizard, and that’s why it felt like a death knell for these sorts of broadcasts. After all, the ratings keep dropping for them anyway. What I can’t figure out, however, is whether this portends a further spiral in mass-public interest or, in the case of the Golden Globes anyway, whether more people will actually tune in next year—if for no other reason than to see what damn thing happens next.
-S.L., 10 January 2020
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