The Golden Globes, the fakest of the (almost) major screen awards, after having briefly died on the operating table, came back to life on Sunday, and its resurrection was made available to the interested public through the new home of CBS and its streaming sister, Paramount+.
As detailed, if not instigated, by this newspaper, the Globes’ former administrators, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, eventually dissolved in a flurry of bad publicity over an extreme lack of diversity among its relatively tiny, dubiously credentialed members. , infamously persuadable, financially complicated and disproportionately demanding membership. The brand is now co-owned by a billionaire and a media company, whose properties include trade magazines Variety and Hollywood Reporter, which not coincidentally benefit from awards-related publicity. (Make of that what you will.) Still, with new institutional oversight and an expanded and scrupulously diverse voting body, the new Globes are arguably less fake than before, which is good, but also, as delivery of prizes, in addition to the points.
As television, the Globes’ reputation is based almost exclusively on being funnier than the Oscars or the Emmys, whose combined territory the Globes encompass: an alcohol-fueled Hollywood party that could produce something wild and reminiscent of the days when All of those ceremonies were private banquets, before becoming television shows held in movie theaters with celebrities riveted to their seats for three hours, staring ahead. (In fact, some Globes guests are sitting with their backs to the stage.)
So here we were, Sunday night, back at the Beverly Hilton hotel, in an elegant setting, emphasizing gold, with terraces filled with tables leading to a circular stage. It was, at least, very well filmed, emphasizing intimacy rather than grandeur. The evening was truly star-studded (almost all the nominees were present) and to the extent that one enjoys watching celebrities in a room react, or not, to jokes at their expense, or to tributes from their colleagues, one could consider the transmission a success. .
Other than that, the broadcast was watchable, like a pretty screensaver, without being interesting in any of the ways the announcer or producers promised. The absence of production numbers, tribute segments and self-congratulatory montages, while in some ways a good thing (it’s the only way to complete a program with so many categories in three hours), means that the evening has a repetitive structural uniformity that It depends entirely on the unpredictable human element to elevate or subvert it.
There was a good amount of elevation; It’s nice to see people recognized, and almost everyone who was recognized seemed sincerely moved, although the countdown clock, which more than one recipient mentioned out loud, kept most in a litany of gratitude to colleagues and families, and away from extracurricular speeches. But there was very little subversion. Robert Downey Jr., who won best supporting actor for “Oppenheimer,” tried to get the party started (“I took a beta blocker, so this is going to be a piece of cake”), but no one joined him at the conga line. In a contrasting human moment, host Kevin Costner seemed awake past his bedtime and barely interested in enduring the part of the joke about him facing America Ferrera. Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig, who I assume prepared their own material, were fun as the music kept interrupting their performance and forcing them to dance. But by then we were already way behind in the transmission.
Kristen Wiig and Will Ferrell dance on stage at the Golden Globe Awards.
(Sonja Flemming/CBS)
Cuts in and out of the commercials featured shots of famous people mingling, away from their tables, with a decided emphasis on shots of Bruce Springsteen; Next year they might consider cutting the awards and just showing the mix.
The one chosen to present, at the last moment, was Jo Koy, a very successful comedian who is used to performing in large halls before thousands of fans, mainly about Filipino culture, but here it seemed disproportionate, out of his reach and a unusual fish. water. His opening monologue seemed to consist primarily of high-volume statements of famous people’s names, not necessarily followed by a joke.
“I got the job 10 days ago,” he said defensively, which is never a good tactic for a comedian. “Do you want a perfect monologue?” He threw the show’s writers under the bus (“I wrote some of these and they’re the ones you laugh at”), which only compounded the feeling that he was agitating; Sometimes I feared that the sweat of failure would short-circuit my television. Taylor Swift’s deadpan reaction to a joke about the difference between an NFL broadcast and the Golden Globes (her punch line was that there were fewer shots of her at the Globes) is a meme when you read this. It could also be surprisingly crude. A joke about prosthetic penises led from “Saltburn” to “Barbie” to “Maestro,” and the lesson she learned from “Succession” was “If you’re a billionaire, retire.” Still, she soldiered on and didn’t let her energy waver in her brief, occasional returns to the stage. And she got Meryl Streep to say “Wakanda forever.”
Whatever its shortcomings as three hours of television, there’s still something to be said for seeing talented people honored, so this year’s Golden Globes, like any year, wasn’t without its satisfying moments. For some reason, institutional or otherwise, it was a diverse group of winners, to such an extent that it made diversity seem so normal and inevitable that it was almost not worth mentioning.
And there are undoubtedly other benefits to the Hollywood ecosystem. Sunday night gave actors who have cooled off for much of 2023, waiting for the end of their strike, something to wear, a chance to get in front of a camera with a minimum of preparation and a maximum of exposition. After all, people like to receive awards, regardless of the source. Additionally, for the presenters and winners, there was a gift bag valued at half a million dollars. And it’s a fact of life that you’re never too old to turn down free food and drinks and $500,000 gift bags.
