The Golden Globes Continue to Amaze


Somewhere in time, the Golden Globe Awards, the annual movie and television awards show presented by 93 mostly obscure members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association became a must-watch Sunday night television event.

It’s still the big Hollywood awards party that it’s always been, with nominees and their entourages hanging out at tables, heading for the bar periodically and restrooms, while awards for acting, screenwriting, directing and music in movie and television land, with an added twist that movies have both musical-comedy and drama categories.

The Golden Globes’ rise to prominence probably coincided with the rise of the red carpet walks by celebrities, artists, and actors and their spouses and companions as a major component of the show, along with the practice of stars being asked “who” they were wearing while an army of paparazzi, television reporters (celebrities themselves) and print journalists, tweeters and bloggers yelled to be recognized.

It’s all well and good, and like most of the world—presumably the internet service is up in North Korea—I did my must-see duty, mostly because I couldn’t help myself. I mean, the depravity, the cleavage, the first Hollywood appearance of George Clooney and his bride Amal Alamuddin, Ricky Gervais, Tina and Amy, and that director-writer from “Birdman,” Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, and “Boyhood” which took 12 years to make, and Billy Bob Thornton’s best speech ever, and Jennifer Lopez and—words failed me there, lest I get abused by an irate commenter.

Even as co-hosts (for the last time, reportedly) Tina Fey and Amy Poehler razzed Clooney again, and, as promised, took on the Bill Cosby saga, and Kevin Spacey apparently overloaded the bleeper, even as the word ass was used twice—Spacey asking an interview if she’d like her to grab her ass, and Globe winner for best actress a drama series Ruth Wilson for “The Affair” complimented co-star Dominick West by telling him that “your ass is a thing of great beauty,” even with all that, the Globes were:

Kinda interesting. Kinda classy.

Even in an event like this, where there is no such thing as wretched excess, only excess, good things can happen to good people, for one thing, and for another, even inside a Hollywood hotel with a ballroom full of Hollywood elites (not you, Ricky Gervais), the world outside was a major presence.

The Globes with its odd category setup always manages to make some silly choices or some you’re not likely to see anywhere else—remember the Madonna win for “Evita” many years ago?

It seems also to favor the outsider spirit, the odd little movie that nobody but the membership and maybe friends and family have seen. These are the kinds of movies—“Still Alice,” which won Julianne Moore a best actress award—or television offerings—the Sundance TV offering, “The Honorable Woman,” which got Maggie Gyllenhaal an award, plus Jennifer Aniston’s “Cake,” which did not get an award—which deserve to come up in the very least for air at a major awards show.

The Globes picks are always dotted with long shots and a couple of Brits—guaranteed. This year’s major Brit was the rising star Eddie Redmayne, who got the best actor award in a drama for playing physicist Stephen Hawking. This year’s long shots were Matt Bomer for “The Normal Heart,” Jeffrey Tambor for “Transparent” and veteran J.K. Simmons for “Whiplash,” which I defy you to find in a theater. Simmons is one of the deserving ones—a craggy, balding, no-nonsense actor who played a recurring shrink on the Law and Order shows, and has a big gig in a State Farmers Insurance group and voiced the yellow M&M in commercials.

There is always a lot of buzz about dresses and clothes, now that the Red Carpet and the fashionista world are imbedded with each other. It’s still a little startling, however, to watch a tough guy like Liv Schreiber tell an interviewer, “I’m wearing Prada.”

It’s also a little, well, amazing, to hear how many times people, clothes, roles, jewelry, wives and husbands are called, well, amazing. I tried to count but stopped at a thousand. And that’s amazing.

People will talk, of course. You couldn’t shut Ricky Gervais up if you tried. They let him be a presenter, after finally not letting him be a host again.

There were great moments that were heart-felt and even resonant of the world outside: Tambor dedicated his award to the transgender community; Michael Keaton, winning for “Birdman,” saluted his son Sean as “kind, smart, did I say kind” and teared up; “The Grand Budapest Hotel” won best musical-comedy picture, which I loved, and “Selma” did not, a result which I did not love.

But it took Clooney to make us remember why we think he’s kind of a classy guy.

For one thing, while all this schmalzarei was going on, a million Frenchmen and several world leaders, including Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, marched down the Boulevard Voltaire to show unity in the face of terrorist murders at the satiric publication Charlie Hebdo, where 12 persons were murdered, as well as for those killed at the kosher supermarket.

Clooney and his wife Amal, a human rights attorney, wore “Je Suis Charlie” buttons, as did many among those attending. But Clooney himself pointed out the outrage and blew an emotional kiss by expressing his luck in love at a later age. More than that, speaking in a room full of the most competitive people in the world, he mindfully told nominees, “If you are in this room, you’ve caught the brass ring.”

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