Virtually every time the Globes had an opportunity to actually be entertaining, the ceremony whiffed.
Virtually every time the Globes had an opportunity to actually be entertaining, the ceremony whiffed.
T he Golden Globes got themselves in a bit of a scandal this year. Was it the lavish jaunt to France that members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association accepted so that they could inspect the making of (surprise Globes nominee!) Emily in Paris? Nah. Not only was that not shocking, it wasn’t even surprising. Everyone assumes attention from the Globes voting body (a group of “journalists” nobody has ever heard of) can be bought, and that the HFPA is about as interested in corruption policing as the Chinese Communist Party.
No, the scandal is that, as it turns out, none of the HFPA’s 87 members are black. Whoops! Next year by this time, there will be a few black members, and the Globes voters will resume being treated like Bourbon kings by the studios and streaming services that spend millions on trophy hunting. Last night, to open the annual Globes ceremony, hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler made a glancing reference in their opening monologue to the inclusion scandal, then three members of the HFPA took the stage to solemnly promise more inclusion, then Jane Fonda, in accepting a lifetime achievement award, gravely intoned that inclusion is really important, and nobody referred to the corruption scandal. Because it isn’t a scandal, just standard operating procedure.
It was the first socially distanced Globes, with even the hosts on opposite coasts, separated by a line running down the middle of the screen between Fey and Poehler (the former in New York City at the Rainbow Room, the latter at the traditional venue, the Beverly Hilton in L.A.). Instead of at least delivering some matey energy between two old friends, the gimmick merely served to remind us of our social separation, as did the sad audience shots of out-of-place-looking first responders sitting at small, socially distanced tables. Nominees stayed home and were pictured via video chats while sitting on their sofas. When their names were read, each little celebrity was depicted in his individual box. It was like three hours of watching the opening credits of The Brady Bunch.
Ladies were so lavishly made up and primped out for the occasion of sitting around the house that they looked ridiculous; Jason Sudeikis went the other way and wore a hoodie, but that didn’t seem to fit the spirit of a supposed gala event either. The best half-solution was the one several men resorted to: tuxedo jacket with no tie. (Maybe no pants either. Who knows?) Trying just a little seemed the proper amount in this season of strangeness.
The usual boozy larkishness and occasional unpredictability of the ceremony, during which (at its best) tables full of celebrities help themselves to wine as Ricky Gervais flays them, was entirely absent. Thanks to social distancing, the absence of audience noise, and technical dramas (first winner Daniel Kuluuya initially couldn’t get his audio to work, and the literal silencing of a black man seemed a little too on the nose), NBC last night fizzed with all of the sparkle of a public-access broadcast of a Delaware zoning-board commission, except maybe with less star power. At least in Delaware, you never know when a roguish Hunter Biden might stumble in asking for directions to the nearest strip club, or inquiring whether this is a laptop-repair shop.
Like the Oscars, the Globes have an existential problem: Does anyone really care anymore? Is anyone tuning in to see Catherine O’Hara or Josh O’Connor collect a trophy? There are a few remaining mega-stars (George Clooney, Will Smith, Julia Roberts) but none of them were on the short lists, and the nominated movies seemed wan and esoteric. Though virtually all of the films honored have been available for weeks — sometimes months — on the major streaming services, and therefore the home audience has enjoyed an opportunity like never before to have seen everything mentioned, the nominees were a list of “What’s that?” I liked the campground-scrounger film Nomadland, for instance — the movie that is quickly becoming known as the Frances McDormand Poops in a Bucket show — but it’s cinema, not television. It’s slow and atmospheric. You won’t make it through if your cell phone is at hand, or if kids are wandering in and out of the room. If you had a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, don’t even try it. It won the top two awards, for Best Picture and Best Director (Chloé Zhao), but it’s a stretch to imagine America dialing up the thing tonight (it’s on Hulu).
Meanwhile, the clunkily written ceremony itself was 62 percent less fun than usual, or maybe it was just the absence of a buzzed and happy audience that made it seem that way. A dual act starring Maya Rudolph and Kenan Thompson (playing “Beverly Jackfruit and François Jean-Rudy,” haha) went straight off the road, then crashed into an incest joke. A series of fake Zoom doctors’ appointments featuring actors doing skits with real doctors worked about as well as asking actors to diagnose social maladies. Which happened repeatedly.
Only the tried-and-true “ask a kindergartener” sketch — you really can’t go wrong with this idea — landed, and it took a surprisingly lovely turn into a salute to the late Chadwick Boseman. Boseman, naturally and even deservedly, won for his last starring role, in Netflix’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and his widow’s speech was a heartbreaker. “He would thank God. He would thank his parents. He would thank his ancestors for their guidance and their sacrifices,” said a tearful Simone Ledward Boseman. “He would say something beautiful, something inspiring, something that would amplify that little voice inside of all of us that tells you you can, that tells you to keep going, that calls you back to what you are meant to be doing at this moment in history.” Wow.
Still, before that late-evening highlight, Al Pacino spoke for all of us watching when he fell asleep. Virtually every time the Globes had an opportunity to actually be entertaining, it whiffed. It could, for instance, have justly recognized someone who is both a) a movie star and b) hilarious when Hugh Grant turned up as a nominee (for The Undoing) for Best Actor in a Limited Series/TV movie. Grant would have slayed. So the Globe went to the reliably earnest catastrophist and I Know This Much Is True star Mark Ruffalo, who dourly informed us, “We have a dying mother, just like the mother in our story. She is Mother Earth.” Ruffalo is the guy who spent last awards season promoting a movie (Dark Water) about how our household Teflon is going to kill us all, and he should never be allowed near a podium. If earth really were a mom, it would gently pinch his cheeks and remind him that nobody likes a little grumpy-pants, dear.