Day: January 11, 2009

Naturally, or at least not unexpectedly, Slumdog Millionaire has won the Golden Globe for Best Dramatic Feature (or whatever the exact award wording is).

The Wrestler‘s Mickey Rourke has beaten Milk‘s Sean Penn with a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama….big one! And a bit of a surprise. A beaming and moustachioed Darren Aronofsky sitting at the table. Rourke says the word “balls” twice. Goes on a bit, orchestra cuts him off, go for it.

Kate Winslet‘s double Golden Globe win — Best Actress for Revolutionary Road and Best Supporting Actress for The Reader — is probably a first. (Isn’t it?) The women who should have won for Best Supporting Actress,no offense, are Vicky Cristina Barcelona‘s Penelope Cruz or Doubt‘s Viola Davis.

Slumdog Milonaire‘s Danny Boyle has won for Best Director.

The Golden Globe for Best Picture, Comedy/Musical has been won by Woody Allen‘s Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

Colin Farrell has won for Best Actor, Comedy-Musical.

The Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor has gone to — who else? never any doubt — The Dark Knight‘s Heath Ledger. Standing ovation. Director Chris Nolan has come to the stage to accept. “An awful mixture of sadness and incredible pride…eternally missed, never forgotten.”

Slumdog Millionaire‘s A.R. Rahman has won the Golden Globe for Best Original Score. How much original music is in Slumdog? I’m just asking.

Best Miniseries or TV movie has gone to John Adams…fine, whatever. An excellent series as far as it went. I would have voted for Recount myself. John Adams star Paul Giamatti has won for Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Mini-Series or TV Movie. Loved him in this. Giamatti will always be more or less the shit. What am I supposed to say? Fine. Congrats.

Tom Wilkinson has won for Best Supporting Actor in a TV movie or miniseries for his Benjamin Franklin performance in HBO’s John Adams. Great. (I think we all knew Entourage‘s Jeremy Piven wouldn’t win for obvious reasons.) John Adams‘ Laura Linney for won for Best Actress in a Mini-Series or TV Movie.And Laura Dern has won in the female category for her performance as Kathryn Harris in HBO’s Recount.

Sally Hawkins‘ performance in Happy-Go-Lucky has won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical. Good for Sally even if Happy-Go-Lucky is by no stretch of anyone’s will or imagination a comedy, much less a musical.

30 Rock‘s Tina Fey has won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy on TV. She obviously reads a lot of stuff online.

Slumdog Millionaire‘s Simon Beaufoy has won the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay. Fine, whatever…what am I supposed to say? Alec Baldwin has won a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical on TV in Prime Time (stop me) for his work on 30 Rock. I’m going to have to condense all this for a single post. It’s just the Golden Globes.

The Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film has righteously gone to Ari Folman ‘s Waltz With Bashir, thus upping the likelihood that this amazing film will triumph also at the Oscars.

“We’re getting out of the early adopter phase and into the mass-market phase. It’s been two and half years since we first introduced a Blu-ray player. 2009 is the year we expect to continue significant growth of the format. This will be our big growth year.” — Blu-ray Disc Association president Andy Parsons.

In other words, cheaper players and…cheaper Bluray discs? Well?

I read somewhere last April that Gerald McMorrow‘s Franklyn was a possible Cannes ’08 entry, but nope. Then I was thought it might turn up at last September’s Toronto Film Festival…sorry. Then I thought it might appear at Sundance ’09….no-go. And now it’s opening in the UK next month with no U.S. release date in sight. Face it — there must be something wrong with it.

Which reminds me — where’s Beeban Kidron‘s Hippie Hippie Shake?

My parents made the mistake of moving into an assisted living facility called East Hill Woods a few years ago. My father was fond of calling this compound, located in dull-as-dishwater Southbury, Connecticut, “death row.” It’s a clean, quiet and very friendly concentration camp for the aged — tidy and comfortable and absolutely horrible for the human spirit. (Mine, anyway.) I would rather collapse and die on a New York street in the dead of winter than live in one of those hell-holes.

The Watermark at East Hill Woods

Things took a turn for the worse two or three years ago when EHW was acquired by a corporation and was re-named the Watermark at East Hill Woods. I knew that was trouble the minute I heard it. Sociopaths, I presumed, would now be determining how my parents lived out their last years.

Jim and Nancy Wells owned a roomy and beautiful Cape Cod-styled home in Wilton, Connecticut, for 30 years. For reasons of fear and uncertainty they decided to sell the home in ’94 (it would now be worth around $900 grand) and buy a nice condo in Heritage Village, which was very pleasant and spacious with low maintenance costs. Then my mother got scared all over again and convinced my dad to sell the Heritage Village condo and buy a unit in East Hill Woods — a $100 grand buy-in plus a monthly maintenance payment of close to $4 grand that went into a kind of “kitty” fund that would eventually help to cover their old-age medical costs.

That was the bottom-line comfort factor for my mother — that the East Hill Woods pricks would at least take care of her when she got really old and sickly.

Except my mother’s income went down sharply after my father’s death last June, and to reduce costs the Nurse Ratched administrators at the Watermark moved her into a one-room unit — the size of a very small laundry room plus a decent- sized bathroom. Now these same people want to move her into an even smaller room — a broom closet. The only thing more humiliating would be to put her into a large military-hospital room with several beds on either side, like the ones that tend to soldiers in movies like Patton and A Farewell to Arms, and zero privacy. What contemptible pricks.

Assisted living centers are about one thing principally — emptying out the saving accounts of old people and getting every last dime. East Hill Woods pocketed every last cent my parents had. Now that there’s almost nothing left and profits are down they’re taking away what’s left of my mother’s dignity in the name of trimming expenses. It’s times like these when I really wish I was in with guys like Tony Soprano and Silvio and Paulie Walnuts .

Last night my son Jett and two of his roommates were discussing wall-poster decorations in their just-moved-into flophouse — a seedy second-floor apartment with five bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom that’s only a couple of blocks from the Syracuse University campus. Jett wanted to put up a poster featuring James Dean and Bob Dylan, and one of the roommates — a very bright 20 year-old who’s (a) gay, (b) African-American and (c) a Republican — said no way. The point is that the guy had never heard of Dean or Dylan. I’m putting it as plainly as I can. The guy had never heard of either one. That’s dedication.

Earlier today The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil posted a list of who will present what award at tonight’s Golden Globes ceremony. I know one thing — the presentation of the Cecil B. DeMille Award to Steven Spielberg is bathroom-break, make-a-meatloaf-sandwich, throw-the-wet-clothes-into-the-dryer time for me. All hail the director of Tintin!

What exactly has Spielberg done lately to deserve another brass kowtow besides having agreed to show up tonight? If Spielberg wasn’t a billionaire big-shot who’s hired a great number of people in this town and whose films have made gazillions over the past 33 years, would he be receiving this award tonight? I mean, it’s not like he made Schindler’s List last year or anything.

If a troubled heterosexual relationship drama had come out this year with scenes as good as this, it would absolutely be among the five Best Picture nominees with a damn good shot to win. The older Carnal Knowledge gets, the better it gets.

The Golden Globes will air at 8 pm tonight on both coasts. For the first time in a long time I won’t be schnorring around the after-parties. Even if I was there in L.A. I don’t know that I’d be feeling all that amped about it. It’s just the Globes. Need to try a little push-back against the cynicism.