As we stumble punch-drunk and bloodied into our second pandemic year, the window dressing is being stripped away. Things are being scaled back to their essences.
To paraphrase the great late Hal Holbrook (RIP) in Wall Street: Hollywood looks into the abyss, and there’s nothing staring back at him. At that moment, Hollywood finds character, and that’s what keeps it out of the abyss.
Hollywood’s done a lot of late-night gazing into the abyss in the past year, all but roasting marshmallows in a bonfire on its edge, and with nothing gazing back—with no junkets or swag suites to comfort, no legions of assistants close at hand to abuse, Hollywood is finding its essence.
Will that keep it out of the abyss?
GLOBE TROTTING
You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh until it hurts at pain and outrage like this from our leading awards pundits:
I don’t want to do this, but I have been left with no choice.
The nominations for the 78th annual Golden Globe Awards, which were unveiled on Wednesday morning, are a complete and utter embarrassment. Not just the announcement of them, which was poorly handled. But the list itself.
Across the Oscar punditocracy, the mavens are speaking out with shock and dismay: Oh HFPA, we trusted you! We told the world you weren’t like that anymore! What hath thou done, o foreign press?!
This is the state of the awards industrial complex, circa 2021, mid-COVID era, so many miles up its own nether regions that it can no longer see a ray of sunlight to remind itself that this was all a big joke to start with.
Just to unwind this for viewers who are joining us late: The Hollywood Foreign Press Association is a collection of 90 self-selected ludicrous hangers-on, who threw an annual banquet that was traditionally a second-hand Fellini-inspired horror show of barely plausible repute.
Which I’m all for! This is Hollywood after all, so who wouldn’t enjoy the fun of that? A giant banquet where maitre d’s and doyennes in tiaras and fake mink wraps hobnob with drunken actors while handing out prizes to whomever bought them the biggest goody bag? Fabulous.
But somewhere along the way, they got respectable. Basically, this preposterous little collective had the good fortune to position their awards show in the exact right spot to be sitting on what would become some immensely valuable real estate. Whether they knew it or not, the Oscar race in which they were once a fourth-tier participant was about to become a sea of money. Enough cash would flow through this race every year to dwarf the gross national products of most of their home countries.
If the Oscar race was going to be fit to hold all this money, it had to be respectable, it had to mean something. Which meant, not just one night but a marathon of events leading up to the big envelope. It would need “precursors” to keep the excitement going, and the Golden Globes was sitting right where the train was going to come through.
But to fill that role, they would have to get a makeover, courtesy of Mr. Entertainment, Dick Clark himself. Pundits would emerge to analyze this. No more trading trophies for goody bags. Now we were all going to take this very very VERY seriously.
Until they went this year and gave best picture nominations to The Prom and Sia’s music video.
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