Award shows can always go one of two ways: utterly drab or a complete shit show. In the case of this year’s Golden Globe Awards, it was somewhere in between. With its lulls and peaks, it served as far more interesting television than last year’s straightforward affair.
While the Hollywood Foreign Press kind of fucked up on their picks for the winners, especially with regard to choosing Matt Damon as Best Actor in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy (though, once again it’s one of those things where you fail to see the comedic value of something like The Martian), those who did deserve to win certainly gave some memorable speeches. Take, for example, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend‘s Rachel Bloom, who very much embodied her character on the show, Rebecca Bunch, as she manically went on about how the pilot got six rejections in one day before miraculously being picked up by the CW. And then there were the presenters themselves, like America Ferrera and Eva Longoria, who threw shade at media outlets known for confusing Latina actresses with any other Latina actress as they ribbed, “Hi I’m Eva Longoria, not Eva Mendes” “And hi, I’m America Ferrera, not Gina Rodriguez.”
Another predictable but disappointing win of the evening came in the form of Lady Gaga winning for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Series, Limited Series or Motion Picture made for Television–yes that’s quite a mouthful, as Tobias Fünke would say. However, it did reap the reward of her bumping up against Leonardo DiCaprio and annoying the fuck out of him, regardless of what he later said to cover up his irritation.
And then there was the too beautiful to look at moment when Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt appeared onstage together to present clips from their nominated in four categories film, The Big Short–which would win nothing. But at least we got to take in the Ocean’s Eleven banter between them. In fact, there should probably be an Ocean’s Fourteen with Gosling in it now.
Other saddening moments that made for an nail-biting watch included Carol losing all of its nominations to other people and Jennifer Lawrence somehow winning Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy for Joy (again, like The Martian, one fails to see how Joy is a musical or comedy). While yes, it is a solid film–the Erin Brockovich of our time–Lawrence certainly didn’t merit the win over, say, Lily Tomlin or Maggie Smith. Plus, she acted like a total cunt to a confused foreign reporter who, like most of us in the twenty-first century, was engaged in his phone and fumbled over his question by name checking the Academy Awards instead of the Golden Globe Awards.
Elsewhere in uncomfortableness, Ricky Gervais had to introduce Mel Gibson again after making a joke about his drunkenness and propensity for racial slurs a few years back by trying to find the only nice thing he could say about Gibson, which was, “I’d rather have a drink with him in his hotel room tonight than Bill Cosby.” Other than that, the Golden Globes proved equally shocking in their selections of winners, most egregiously in choosing Sylvester Stallone over Paul Dano for Best Supporting Actor, Gael Garcia Bernal over Aziz Ansari for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy TV Show, Inside Out over Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa for Best Animated Feature and “Writing’s On The Wall” over “Simple Song #3” (as a matter of point, it was heart-wrenching that Youth wasn’t nominated at all) for Best Original Song. But hey, at least there are memes galore from this year’s show–which may be overlooked thanks to the monumental overshadowing of David Bowie’s death on the same day. All in all, a momentous weekend for pop culture.
