Globe-trotting
And the awards season was going so well…
It was great. No endless media reports about movies I hadn’t seen. No speculating on the varying chances for this Oscar or that award. No more having to embarrass myself with ridiculous Academy Award predictions that only make me look silly and give readers the opportunity to wonder why they bother reading movie blogs in general or this one in particular. It was a relief.
Then the peaceful bliss of ignorance began to be disturbed. I started hearing mentions of—gulp—the dreaded Golden Globes. Could they possibly be going ahead? What was the point? I don’t mean precisely what was the point at this moment in time when everything was disrupted and/or shut down by the pandemic. I have been asking what the point of the Golden Globes is for years. Yet they were going ahead anyway. Of course, they were. Why wouldn’t they? The Hollywood Foreign Press Association exists in its own parallel virtual reality anyway. Of course, they were going ahead with their pointless, meaningless, vacuous awards.
Something was different this time, however. There was a certain trend in the online newspapers, at least in my part of the world. “Golden Globes organisers criticized over payments and membership,” blared The Guardian. “Golden Globes 2021 and the ‘doddering, faintly corrupt’ group that chooses the winners,” declared The Irish Times. Elsewhere, though, The Irish Times had another headline more traditionally typical of coverage in this country: “Golden Globes 2021: Who should win, who will win and are any of them Irish?”
Yes, what passes for the mainstream media here finally caught up with what a lot of actual film buffs had been saying for ages. The HFPA and its awards fit the technical definition of a scam. Oh, and to answer The Times’s question, no, none of the Irish nominees—not Brendan Gleeson for playing President Trump in The Comey Rules, not the lauded animated feature Wolfwalkers, not even the hot-and-heavy series Normal People—had any joy.
So this was definitely the year to make good on my annual promise to myself to completely ignore the Golden Globes, right? If I couldn’t do it this year, when everyone’s attention was scattered in so many other places and nobody was much interested in awards shows after a year where schedules and norms had completely broken down, then when could I? Well, the fact that I’m writing this and that you’re reading this means that the answer is apparently never.
Yes, we watched. Specifically, we watched the mercifully-but-not-quite-mercifully-enough edited-down international condensed version that aired the following night. Yes, it was basically bad, but aggravatingly there was just enough interesting or worthwhile stuff to make me glad not to have missed it—as much as I wished I had the fortitude and stamina to.
First off, is there something weird about an organization of foreign (I’m being American-centric here and don’t go calling me xenophobic because the word “foreign” is right there in the group’s official name) alleged journalists giving two of its top awards (Best Film – Musical or Comedy and Best Actor in a Film – Musical or Comedy) to a movie (in fact a sequel) to a raunchy mocku-reality-comedy of which the basic premise is to ridicule the idea of a foreign journalist. I’m talking about the Sacha Baron Cohen vehicle Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, in case you can’t be bothered to look it up. (Was it really better than Hamilton? Really?) Of course, Baron Cohen thinks the movie is much more profound and momentous than that. He seems to think he single-handedly brought down the Trump presidency. Good man yerself, Sacha.
What was strange about the ceremony, with the able but handicapped hosting talents of stalwarts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, is that hosts and presenters not only engaged in the usual razzing of the HFPA—though no one razzes like the absent Ricky Gervais—but this time the zingers were more on the money, more intended to draw actual pain, more, well, accurate. Interestingly, though, the on-air talent was not content merely to point out the small, unrepresentative and kickback-friendly nature of the voting body. They drove home the point that the HFPA is not diverse enough, that it is too white. Okay, yeah, there’s the actual fundamental problem with this handful of foreign alleged journalists. They don’t have an affirmative action program. If highlighting that doesn’t put an end to this annual charade, then nothing will.
Let stop being so negative, though. What can I find good to say about the evening. Well, there was a certain amount of schadenfreude in seeing all those celebrities having to sit at home on their couches watching the thing on screens like the rest of us. What was surprising was how so few of their media rooms didn’t look any fancier or luxurious than one’s own. It kind of felt like voyeurism. When Jodie Foster was announced as the Best Supporting Actress in a Film for The Mauritanian, it was as though we had barged into her house and caught her and her wife actually sitting there in their pajamas. How embarrassing!
Perhaps the best moment was when Jason Sudeikis won Best Actor in a TV Series – Musical or Comedy and then went into a long, rambling, pointless speech and fellow nominee (in a different window of our virtual Zoom screen) impatiently began twirling his finger as a signal to wrap it up—which Sudeikis obediently did. The funny thing is that up until then there seemed to be no time limits on the winners’ acceptance speeches, but after that, music seemed to start playing about 30 seconds into everyone’s acceptance speech—and each time was duly ignored by the speaker.
As for the truly worthwhile moments of the evening, three stand out. One was the acceptance speech by Chadwick Boseman’s widow for the award he won for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Sure, someone had given her a list of people to thank, but because it was of no possible career benefit to anyone, it had the quaintness of feeling sincere. Moreover, there was no escaping the emotion of the moment and the magnitude of the loss of that acting talent.
The other two worthwhile moments were the lifetime achievement awards to Norman Lear and Jane Fonda. We’re always a sucker for career retrospectives of figures who have been around for years and have had a major impact on the arts and our lives. As the second recipient of his award, Lear did a nice tribute to the first recipient for whom it is named, Carol Burnett. As for Fonda, at 83 she hardly looks old enough to have had a sixty-year acting career, and I mean that in an uncanny-valley kind of way. But there is no denying her talent, longevity and, whatever you may think of her views, her political passion. Unlike Lear, she did not pay homage to the person for whom her award had been named, Cecil B. DeMille.
Finally, congratulations to Chloé Zhao, the winner of Best Director – Film for Nomadland. I haven’t actually seen her movie, but I am now inclined to—not only because she put the wonderful Frances McDormand in her movie but because she herself seems like a genuinely lovely person.
-S.L., 2 March 2021
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