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Gotta love a show where the stars show up drunk and moon the audience, as Jack Nicholson did when he won a Golden Globe, his fifth, in 1999.
Don’t have to respect it, though.
Jerry Seinfeld mocked the proceedings the year he scoped the cornucopia of glowing cleavage before him and suggested an alternative meaning of “globes.”
The Golden Globes show, at 8 p.m. EST Monday, is a joke. Always has been.
Ninety journalists, not all of them the most fully employed of foreign correspondents, confer the prize upon award-hungry members of the Hollywood community. Given the sheer quantity of statuettes the group has distributed since it was formed in 1943, it’s safe to say that never have so many owed so much to so few.
There are so many awards—and so many awards shows—that “the economy of prestige,” as Harvard professor James F. English calls it in his study of that name, is dangerously inflationary.
Yet even this scoffer grudgingly admits that the GGs is the most enjoyable awards show of swag season. And that there is something to be learned from even the most frivolous of spectacle.
(Swag season? That statuette-silly period that begins in December and continues through the Oscars in March, and has effectively replaced winter.)
The Globes are the Oscar pre-party, where presenters and nominees get soused on Moet and mouth off as they would never do at the Academy Awards.
“Oscars are business, the Globes are fun,” says Warren Beatty, who will receive the GGs’ Cecil B. DeMille Award (for career achievement) Monday night.
I’m addicted to the GGs because they’re the movie industry equivalent of MTV unplugged: Showbiz unscripted and uncensored.
The network is addicted because awards shows are the most cost-effective programming for networks and cable webs: Stars show up for free.
Film distributors are addicted because they get free advertising for nominated movies, some of which already are conveniently available on DVD and VOD.
The beauty and fashion industry are addicted because it’s free promotion for their new colors, looks and products.
And we know why the stars shine the brightest that night: The GGs boosts their visibility and bankability.
It may be the most mutually beneficial daisy chain in the history of advertorial arrangements.
The GGs is just one among the proliferation of swag-season events.
Annually there are about 36 “kudofests” (as they’re known in the trade), calculates awards maven Tom O’Neil. From People’s Choice to Kid’s Choice to the Globes, the statuette shows are inescapable. Still, the list is down from more than 40 in 2001, when even the History Channel got into the spirit with its “Harry” award, named for the classical historian Herodotus.
“Hollywood always has been an awards-sick town, but it’s metastasized,” sighs Len Klady, industry analyst at Moviecitynews.com. Recently in the Guardian, a British reporter estimated that in the movie industry, prize proliferation was disproportionate to the product, with twice as many cinema prizes awarded annually as there are movies released.
Not only are there the three dozen or so televised kudofests, but during swag season there are almost as many critics’ groups conferring laurels. From L.A. to Boston, New York to Austin—and don’t forget St. Louis and Oklahoma (!)—such critical cadres are multiplying faster than bunnies. And yes, there’s a back-scratching arrangement here, too: If you’re a member of a critics group, distributors send you DVDs of their product at awards time.
The awards frenzy recalls Alvy Singer’s verdict in “Annie Hall”: “Awards! All they do out here is give out awards! `Greatest fascist dictator: Adolf Hitler.’”
Given the foregoing, it sounds counterintuitive to suggest that there is some cultural value to be gleaned from awards-giving. Maybe not in the ceremonies themselves, but in what the winners say about the culture’s predispositions and prejudices.
In November, while sifting through my favorite performances of 2006, I realized to my surprise that three presumptive nominees in the lead-actress categories—Judi Dench (“Notes on a Scandal”), Helen Mirren (“The Queen”), and Meryl Streep (“The Devil Wears Prada”)—were all on the far side of 50. I knew that bucked the recent “babe factor” trend of the Oscars and Globes going to actresses in their 20s and 30s—think Halle Berry, Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon.
Before I could consult Oscar.com to see how long it had been since that award was bestowed upon a woman of a certain age, O’Neil supplied me with the stat that “it’s been 15 years since a woman over 50 won the top-actress prize.” (He’s right—it was Jessica Tandy in 1989 for “Driving Miss Daisy.”)
Although the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences does not break down its membership by gender, it is widely believed that more than two-thirds and perhaps as much as three-quarters is male. “Which is why the babes inevitably win,” O’Neil says. He adds, “I think they vote with their johnsons.”
This is the year, he says, “that they must prove my worst suspicions wrong.”
I can confidently predict that Monday night at the Globes, which divides the fields between comedy and drama, Mirren, who is both a babe and over 60, will win a pair of globes for her performances on television’s “Elizabeth I” and as the screen’s Elizabeth II in “The Queen.” And I can also confidently predict that Streep, closing in on six-oh, and a babe (brainiac division) will win the trophy for “Prada.”
Call me counterintuitive.
