The Wall Street Journal-20080115-Where Boredom Was Golden
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Where Boredom Was Golden
Los Angeles -- During the Cambrian Period of the celebrity culture, when publicity-seeking life forms had just begun to proliferate with fierce vigor, one of Hollywood's trade papers described the Hollywood Foreign Press Association as 80 (or so) stringers living on hors d'oeuvres. If the description was uncharitable, it was not unfair. For a long time the HFPA had been an exceedingly seedy lot whose reputation was tawdry, albeit untarnished, since there'd been no luster on its Golden Globes to begin with. Then its members found a way to live much higher on the Hollywood hog -- by turning their tacky awards into the pretext for a big, nationally televised party whose star-studded guest list, ridiculous categories and reliable silliness preceded and in some ways eclipsed the relatively sober-sided ritual of the Oscars. This year, though, the group was reduced to living on crumbs.
Its reversal of fortune was caused, of course, by the Writers Guild strike, so the bizarre events of Sunday night possessed a certain gravitas (or at least an authentic glumness). It wasn't just that acceptance speeches went undelivered, cliches went undroned, red carpets went unrolled and outlandish gowns went unparaded. People were out of work all over town in an industry that has pretty much shut down for the duration. When Mary Hart said she yearned for the days of Jack Nicholson mooning the ceremonies, everyone knew what she meant. (As cultural watersheds go, Angelina Jolie's 1999 pseudo-spontaneous splash in a pool in a see-through dress wasn't chopped liver either.) And when the HFPA's president, Jorge Camara, ventured gamely that this year's bare-bones press conference "really has turned into a very positive event," people felt he was putting the best possible face on the show-biz equivalent of Mel Gibson's movie "The Man Without a Face."
The press conference starred, in a manner of speaking, entertainment-show anchors pressed into service as presenters. This presented two problems right off the bat. The term "entertainment-show anchor" is an oxymoron; people succeed in that line of work by being unanchored to any seabed of reality. And the presenters lacked receivers; the best they could do was reassure the honorees that their honors were in the mail. No surprise, then, that the supposedly hour- long show could fill only half of its allotted time, or that Brad Bird, the personable genius behind Pixar's "Ratatouille," watched from San Francisco as his movie scored a globular win for best animated feature, then spoke of the pell-mell show as surreal: "It was like the whole thing was on fast-forward."
It was also on and off the rails, as usual. "Atonement" as best picture? Why not? Julian Schnabel as best director for "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"? A lovely surprise, though where was "There Will Be Blood"'s Paul Thomas Anderson on the list of nominees? But what about the lunacy -- no longer even discussed, let alone deplored -- of lumping musicals and comedies together so that the wonderful "Juno" had to go up against the terrific "Sweeney Todd," which won? (And the singular "Once" wasn't nominated either.)
Still, a case can be made for Mr. Camara's positivity: The stuff that went on the air without benefit of writers was so positively god- awful that it served as a reminder of what indispensable work writers do. And a companion case can be made for the notion that, with all deference to Mr. Bird, this year's Golden Globes weren't on fast- forward but on fast-rewind, to a time before the advent of the entertainment age that currently holds us stupefied in its thrall.
What a concept, a Golden Globes show that didn't for a single moment entertain. The press conference was baleful enough, but the spirit of anti-entertainment found its purest expression in the hour-long program -- almost concurrent with the press conference, but not quite -- that NBC cobbled together after losing its exclusive rights to the annual show. The hosts, a pair of cyborgs in the spotlight, were Billy Bush and Nancy O'Dell of "Access Hollywood." The chemistry between them was nil -- their relationship on stage was that of a maglev train and its monorail. Mr. Bush blathered haplessly about movies and performers being wonderful, great, marvelous and wonderful, while Ms. O'Dell displayed the emotional range of those steel-voiced young women -- "How does losing your sextuplets to a tornado make you feel?" -- who play reporters on local TV news broadcasts.
Yet the show's very inertness, its unswerving matter-of-factness -- a deadpan voice-over touted "NBC's coverage of the 65th Golden Globes Awards Announcement" -- offered an oasis of boredom, if not quite calm, in an era of overwritten, overstated, oversung and overwrought entertainment that began with Andrew Lloyd Webber and shows no sign of abating. Announcing lists of winners has been good enough for the Nobel prizes, the Pulitzer prizes and the MacArthur awards. What about announcements for the Grammys, the Emmys, the Oscars and the presidential primaries? We'd lose glitz but gain time.
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Mr. Morgenstern is the Journal's film critic.
