Golden Globes: Short, Not So Sweet Nor Shiny

The irony was almost too easy. The first Golden Globe award handed out--rather, announced from the stage by a television presenter with neither the winner nor any other star in sight--was to Cate Blanchett for I'm Not There.

Also not there, in the Beverly Hilton's International Ballroom that was crowded with television crews--around 65 camera set-ups-- and working media of various kinds--was any real hint of the typical Globes glamor and gab. Prior to the 35-minute unveiling, the two descriptive words "surreal" and "bizarre" were passed back and forth by a press corps with little to do--at one point, infotainment queen Mary Hart, usually the one pointing a mike in someone's face, was being tailed by an inquisitive mob.

The display of sportsmanship normally hyper-competitive infotainment hosts drew some comments from the stage. Hollywood Foreign Press Association president Jorge Camara was praised for making that happen, and CNN's Jim Moret said of the well-liked Camara that the evening "reflects your style and grace and I applaud you." Online viewers followed it all at the E!Online web site, while NBC viewers were given the news by co-anchors Billy Bush and Nancy O`Dell in a presentation compared by the Los Angeles Times to a Wayne's World segment, laced with Bush's asides of varying, if generally low, acuity.

Polite applause greeted the winners, though both Best Pictures-- Atonement for Drama and Sweeney Todd (Comedy or Musical) got more than the perfunctory amount the other winners drew. It was almost as if the 82 members of the HFPA--perhaps stung by suddenly former New York Times correspondent Sharon Waxman's controlled diatribe on the Los Angeles Times op-ed page were trying to claim their relevance as the un-Oscars. Daniel Day-Lewis' win as best actor for There Will Be Blood and Javier Bardem's for best supporting actor in No Country for Old Men (which also nabbed the screenplay award) seemed more reflective of what may be the Academy's mood this year. Although the article's points were about as revelatory as New York Times writer Stephanie Rosenbloom's droll recent ones ("The [cyberspace] scholars found it common for online daters to fudge their age or weight, or to post photographs that were five years old. Also, the world is round and the chemical symbol for water is H2O.") they re-emphasized the granfalloon nature of the exercise. It's not the fault of the HFPA members--Baum-Lappe and Czaderska-Hayek, Kahana, Kanto and Kingma, Malouki, Nun-Katz and Von Arx, that they're not household names in America; but Waxman's contention is that they're generally not even household names in their own national press circles.

That said, Hollywood woke up feeling like something curiously fun and valuable had been blown--as initial presenter Lara Spencer (The Insider) put it, in a brave and witty aside that made everyone in the room heave a sigh of relief that some realism would be brought to bear--"It just feels different...talk about that lump in the corner under the rug..."

The much larger lump in the corner, of course, is the threatened February 24 Oscars. No one wants a repeat of the Globes' game but painfully drab presentation. With the Directors Guild apparently ready to strike a deal as quickly as possible, and the writers' cause beginning to suffer from the industry and the public's compassion fatigue (a rather forlorn group of crew members and their families were picketing outside the Hilton with please for a settlement), a deal with the writers before the Oscars date is still a possibility.