I watched enough of the 70th Annual Golden Globes to confirm that I still hate these Hollywood award shows. The Globes at least don’t take themselves as seriously and everybody gets hammered, which is usually good for some laffs. Plus, having sat in that big Beverly Hilton ballroom through countless TCA sessions, it is always fun to see how much bigger the joint looks on television.
The telecast was a winner for NBC, scoring as the highest-rated Golden Globes broadcast in five years in the U.S. overnights.
Still, for me anyway, all the kiss-ass and back-slapping gets brutally tiresome after 20 minutes. It didn’t help that CTV crossed the line by filling the screen with endless promo keys and sponsor lower third keys specifically over acceptance speeches. Are they going to be able to get away with that through the Oscars?
Anyway, in the interest of running Paul Drinkwater’s many excellent NBC photos, here are the highlights:
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are such likable hosts and showed Ricky Gervais that you can be snarky and lethal and still be adorable. Poehler got a lot of the best lines, including the Kathryn Bigelow crack that, “when it comes to torture, I trust the lady who spent three years married to James Cameron.”
The whole Saturday Night Liveliness of the deal was getting to me after a while, though. I’m with Tommy Lee Jones on the bit Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig did. The sketch went on and on and, yeah, I get it, you didn’t watch any of the nominated films.
The cutaway to a very pissed off Jones should win the director of the Globes a statue of his own next year. Biggest laff of the night.
Funnier, to me, were the aging comedy duo of Stallone and Schwarzenegger. Shouldn’t Stallone get a turn as governor of Pennsylvania now? Amour director Michael Haneke’s quip that “I never thought I would get an award in Hollywood by an Australian,” was a winner.
Having Hillary’s husband come out to introduce a movie clip seems like overkill, doesn’t it? Should ex-presidents really be that cozy with the Hollywood Foreign Press? Clinton kept going on about Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, but, the truth is, Spielberg drives a Mercedes. That film lost six of the seven awards it was up for Sunday night, but Daniel Day Lewis did pick up an award for LinkedIn.
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John Goodman (above, right) was joined on stage by Tony Mendez, the real-life CIA agent who helped sneak those hostages out of Terran as depicted in Ben Affleck’s movie Argo. As Mendez’s speech indicated, he accomplished this by boring the border guards half to death.
I had already switched over to Happy Endings by the time Jody Foster got some sort of award, probably for sitting so long next to Mel Gibson. Foster apparently announced she was retiring from acting to become a full time lesbian. Check please!
