“As you can see, we unfortunately have a bad connection,” Laura Dern said, seven minutes into the Golden Globe Awards, on Sunday night. It was the first award of the evening, and Dern had the bad luck of beta-testing the hybrid ceremony, which unfolded on bicoastal stages and in the remote Nowheresville of famous people’s couches. She had just announced Daniel Kaluuya’s award for best supporting actor in a drama, for his role as the Black Panther activist Fred Hampton, in “Judas and the Black Messiah.” But Kaluuya, chewing gum in front of a bookshelf, was muted when he tried to give his acceptance speech. Just as Dern was moving the show along, Kaluuya could be heard protesting, “You’re doing me dirty! You’re doing me dirty! You’re doing me dirty! Am I on?”
It was an inauspicious but apt beginning for a disjointed, racially compromised ceremony. The Golden Globes are typically Hollywood’s drunk wedding, silly and loose-limbed even when the choice of honorees confounds. Their eccentricity stems from that of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the eighty-seven-person body that bestows the dubious yet coveted prizes, whose members have long been ridiculed for sidling up to celebrities and accepting Babylonian amounts of swag. We watch anyway, because the show is usually fun, and because it’s on TV. This year, however, the H.F.P.A.’s idiosyncrasies didn’t seem so benign. A week before the awards, a Los Angeles Times investigation detailed the organization’s inner workings, including large payments to its members. Even more damaging: none of them is Black.
This revelation only added to the WTF-ness of the nominations—a Golden Globes staple, but more unsettling this time around. How did the flimsy “Emily in Paris” manage to get two nominations, while Michaela Coel’s ravishing “I May Destroy You” got left out? What was Sia’s widely maligned autism movie, “Music,” doing on the list, or James Corden’s hammy turn in “The Prom”? And what did it say that “Minari,” an American-made drama about a Korean-immigrant family searching for the American dream in Arkansas, was filed in the foreign-language category? Nothing good. And so we got a ceremony that looked, at times, like a rock had been lifted above a colony of embarrassed fire ants. “We look forward to a more inclusive future,” promised Ali Sar, of Turkey, one of three H.F.P.A. members who had the unenviable task of presenting themselves on camera.
The hosts, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, were less rosy. “The Hollywood Foreign Press Association is made up of around ninety international—no Black—journalists, who attend movie junkets each year in search of a better life,” Fey said, at the top of the night. “We say ‘around ninety,’ because a couple of them might be ghosts, and it’s rumored that the German member is just a sausage that somebody drew a little face on.” It was nice to see Fey and Poehler back at the wheel for the first time since 2015, but something in me—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—longed for Ricky Gervais, who, even when he grates, is unrivalled at biting the hand that feeds him. Working on separate coasts, at the Beverly Hilton and the Rainbow Room, Poehler and Fey put on their subversive smiles, but they were up against a lot: not just the tarnished value of the awards themselves but the technology that dragged all of Hollywood into the banality of the Zoomscape.
I don’t know about you, but one skill that I’ve picked up during the pandemic has been keeping a respectable face on during Zoom meetings, knowing that anyone’s attention could be on me at any time. It’s a skill that movie stars have long practiced at awards shows, especially when they lose. But here it all seemed horrifyingly familiar, as the camera cut to Aaron Sorkin or Glenn Close, smiling diligently from their private quarters at all times, just in case. The Globes somehow made it worse by segueing into each commercial break with a preview of the nominees to come, forced into awkward chit-chat from their adjacent boxes. “Hi, Mr. Pacino,” Bob Odenkirk (“Better Call Saul”) said to his fellow-nominee for best actor in a television drama. “Very good to meet you . . . on the screen.” (Both lost to Josh O’Connor, who plays Prince Charles on “The Crown.”) Anyone who’s had to kick off a teleconference knows the feeling.
More endearing, by a hair, was Sarah Paulson, trapped in a similar setup with her competitors for best actress in a TV drama, scrunching a dog and asking Emma Corrin, who later won for playing Princess Diana, “Where’s your cat?,” while Olivia Colman leaned in eagerly. There were a few good pet shots, including one of a pup named Ziggy, seen climbing over her owner (and a surprise winner, for “The Mauritanian”) Jodie Foster. Truth be told, though, I’ve lost my interest in glimpsing the well-appointed guest bedrooms of the stars. It was fun back in September, when the Emmy Awards went remote. But, nearly twelve months in, I just can’t muster much enjoyment out of Colman’s tribal-mask décor or Colin Farrell’s globe (not golden). It seemed especially demeaning to lose, all dressed up in solitude, but somehow worse to win and then get played off in your own home by seventies-game-show music, as the control room tried to pull on Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland”), just as the only female director to win the category since Barbra Streisand received the award for “Yentl” was describing her film as a “pilgrimage through grief and healing.”
It was instructive, though, to see how the nominees interpreted the dress code. Corden was in a snappy tux, and Amanda Seyfried (“Mank”) in Oscar de la Renta, while Jeff Daniels wore dad flannel, and Jodie Foster and her wife stuck to pajamas. (It was heartening to see Foster so at ease, after a long road out of the closet.) Jason Sudeikis, the mustachioed star of “Ted Lasso,” went with a white hoodie with blue and green splotches, perhaps befitting a newly single forty-five-year-old. Having won the prize for best actor in a TV comedy, he babbled on about Tolstoy (I’ve experienced his zeal for quotable wisdom firsthand), until his category companion Don Cheadle gave him a wrap-it-up gesture, and he admitted he was getting “a little windy, as my Aunt Loretta would say.” Sudeikis epitomized the glazed-over disorientation of the whole affair, as did Tracy Morgan, who announced the prize for best animated film, for “Soul”—but pronounced it more like “Sal.” Honestly, we’re all trying our best out here. You could even forgive Rosamund Pike (who won for “I Care a Lot”) for thanking “America’s broken legal system, for making it possible to make stories like this.” Glamour, whimsy, political speechifying: Can any of it break through the Zoomy malaise?
Sometimes. If the Globes do anything consistently well, it’s rooting the telecast in barn-burning lifetime-achievement speeches, something the Academy has strangely chosen to eschew. This year, the television honors went to Norman Lear, going on ninety-nine and in full mensch-hood. The clips of his groundbreaking series, among them “All in the Family,” “The Jeffersons,” and “Maude,” gave some meat to the awards-show happy talk about the power of storytelling. Later on, Jane Fonda, accepting the film award, did more than what was asked of her: she spun the clammy discomfort of the evening into something plainspoken and resonant. “There’s a story we’ve been afraid to see and hear about ourselves in this industry,” she said, “a story about which voices we respect and elevate and which we tune out, a story about who’s offered a seat at the table and who is kept out of the rooms where decisions are made.” (She ended her speech with a birthday shout-out to the eighty-two-year-old Tommy Tune, who, let’s hope, was doing something more festive than watching this awards show.)
Both speeches were moving, but the night’s emotional high point came from someone relatively unknown: Taylor Simone Ledward, who accepted the award for best actor in a drama on behalf of her late husband, Chadwick Boseman (“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”). Through tears, she looked into the mechanical wormhole and said, “He would thank God. He would thank his parents. He would thank his ancestors for their guidance and their sacrifice.” The speech had soul. As for the rest of this year’s graceless Golden Globes, well, it had Sal.
