Day: January 16, 2011

Golden Globe summary: After all the heavy campaigning and two awards ceremonies over the last couple of nights, it would feel more correct and fitting if the Oscars were to happen earlier than February 27th. Wouldn’t it? Isn’t it all pretty much over? Is there a sentiment shift yet to come? Doubt it. And yet we’re looking at another six weeks. I don’t want to screw up the Santa Barbara Film Festival timetable, but…well, the Academy needs a re-think. Really.

10:55 pm: The clapping, cheering and love for Michael Douglas is obviously the warmest moment of the evening. “There’s gotta be an easier way to get a standing ovation,” he quips. And the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, Drama goes to The Social Network. Dave Karger, Anne Thompson, Peter Howell, David Poland and other errant Gurus…you need to take a long walk or a long drive or a long hot bath and, like, re-assess. Okay, don’t. It’s still an open contest!

10:47 pm: Colin Firth wins again for Best Actor for his performace in The King’s Speech. Locked down and Oscar-secured, as it has been for weeks.

10:46 pm: “Poor people are gross and they smell bad.” — quote attibuted to Sandra Bullock by Ricky Gervais.

10:38 pm: Tom Hanks and Tim Allen presenting the Best Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical award, and the winner — good one — is The Kids Are All Right. Even if it’s not “comedic.” Throwing in natural sprinklings of humor into a relationship-family piece doesn’t make it so. Congrats nonethless to director-cowriter Lisa Cholodenko. Oh, and to producer Celine Rattray, who looks dazzling in her white gown and her Turks and Caicos tan.

10:34 pm: Natalie Portman wins, naturally, the Best Actress award for Black Swan. The HFPA really isn’t kidding around with this Critics Choice Awards 2 thing. Portman is so happy and beautiful, and is starting to look pleasantly and quite radiantly plump — obviously quite a contrast from her appearance in the film.

10:25 pm: Barney’s Version‘s Paul Giamatti wins for Best Comedy/Musical Actor. “People busted their asses to get [this movie] made…I had three wives, a trifecta of hotties, and I got to smoke and drink and got paid for it.”

10:20 pm: How many people are on stage to accept the Glee award for Best Comedy /Musical TV Series award? 18? 19?

10:14 pm: Time for David…I mean, the Best Director, Motion Picture award. And the Golden Globe goes to David Fincher for The Social Network. “Popping for pizza like chiclets?” Oh, sorry…”popping propecia like chiclets.” My idea of a gracious, relaxed and settled-down speech. “I’m personally loathe to respond to the praise this film has received for fear of becoming addicted to it,” he says. I hear that.

10:02 pm: A Robert De Niro tribute. Forget all the crap he’s done over the last decade because he was really great in the ’70s and…okay, part of the ’80s and definitely in 1990 in Goodfellas. And he was! Which is why everyone’s standing and whoo-whooing him right now. Thoroughly deserved. At the mike De Niro acknowledges that Little Fockers is shit. An amusing line about posing for pictures with the Hollywood Foreign Press, etc. He’s reading the whole thing off a teleprompter.

9:50 pm: The Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress award goes to The Fighter‘s Melissa Leo. This is the Critics Choice Awards…admit it! Congrats to Melissa. On her way to a perfect strike. She’s breathless, ecstatic…cool.

9:36 pm: The winner of the Golden Globe Best Foreign Language Film — “a category nobody in America cares about!,” says Gervais — is Susanne Bier‘s A Better World. Excellent call. Bier is genius-level — certainly one of the finest female directors working today.

9:27 pm: The Best Screenplay award naturally goes to The Social Network‘s Aaron Sorkin. “The people who watch movies are at least as smart as the people who make movies,” he says. (Really?) Kudos to Mark Zuckerberg, you turned out well, etc. Sure, fine.

9:13 pm: Al Pacino (soon to portray Phil Spector!) wins the Best Actor, TV Dramatic Film-or-whatever-it’s-called award for Barry Levinson and HBO’s You Don’t Know Jack. Good call. Wise. Pacino’s quietest performance since Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part II. Geoffrey Rush‘s head is shaved because…?

9:00 pm: Gervais: “Some of you know Robert Downey, Jr. from the Betty Ford Clinic and the Los Angeles County Jail.” Wait…what’s Downey doing? He’s pushing it. We’re all pushing it. This show is pushing it. (It has to. What else can it do?) Best Actress, Musical or Comedy and…yes! Annette Bening has her win…her moment. Intensely right-on. This is the end of the Bening awards parade but we’re okay with that. We love her, a great mom…cool.

8:55 pm: Justin Beiber is…what, three inches shorter than Hailee Steinfled? What is he, eight years old? Toy Story 3 wins for Best Animated Feature or whatever they’re calling it. Fine, richly deserved, thumbs up.

8:50 pm: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross winning the Best Original Score award for their work on The Social Network means that The King’s Speech is finished as far as winning the Best Motion Picture, Drama award. Right? An indicator, I mean. Dispute?

8:46 pm: Nobody cares about the Golden Globes choice of Best Original Song. Eff Best Original Song. Eff it up the bunghole! And the winner? “You Haven’t Seen The Last Of Me” from Burlesque! The trip to Vegas worked! The whores dropped to their knees and delivered!

8:37 pm: Boardwalk Empire wins the Golden Globe for Best TV Dramatic Series-or-whatever. 8:35 pm: Steve Buscemi wins the Best Supporting Actor in a TV Drama-or-Miniseries-or-whatever award for his tough-darts gangster guy in Boardwalk Empire. Down with that. Good show but honestly? I’ve only watched it twice. Is it okay if I promise to buy/rent/watch the DVD box set?

8:30 pm: “Eva Longoria has the daunting task of having to introduce the president of the Hollywood Foreign Press,” says Gervais. “Oooh!” says the audience. “That’s nothing!,” says Gervais. “I just had to haul him off the toilet and pop his teeth in!” Corrupt red-haired scumbag!

8:18: Julianne Moore and Kevin Spacey hand a Golden Globe for Best TV Movie or Miniseries or Whatever to Olivier Assayas‘ Carlos. Good call@ Taste buds! Shut up with the prompt music…show respect! These are Carlos guys!

8:06 pm: Scarlett Johnasson hands out the Best Supporting Actor award to Christian Bale for The Fighter. Naturally, sure, no surprise. Are the Globes going to be exactly like the Critics Choice Awards? We may as well face that possibility.

8:01 pm: Ricky Gervais starts off with a few Charlie Sheen jokes…thud. And then a Tourist joke – “It must be good because it’s nominated so shut up. The HFPA also accepted bribes.” And a Tom Cruise/John Travolta gay joke — “”Also not nominated was I Love You Philip Morris with Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor. Two heterosexual characters pretending to be gay. So the complete opposite of some famous Scientologists, then. My lawyers helped me with the wording of that joke.” And a Hugh Hefner fellatio joke. And a Lost joke — “the fat one ‘et them all.” And: “Here is beautiful, talented and Jewish…Mel Gibson told me that, he’s obsessed! — Scarlett Johansson!”

The Golden Globes will begin in 15 minutes, and two happenings may or may not make them a semi-noteworthy event (or at least, you know, something to talk about tomorrow): (a) Ricky Gervais‘s opening monologue and (b) The King’s Speech winning the Best Motion Picture, Drama…or not. That’s it — the whole show in a nutshell. Here are yesterday’s Gold Derby predictions.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck did it, aided and abetted by Angelina Jolie. Florian was too mood-obsessed, too focused on style, too willing to flatter the big-star aura of Jolie and costar Johnny Depp. That’s the conclusion from The Daily Beast‘s Nicole Laporte about why The Tourist was such a stinker.

Von Donnersmarck “was not interested [in] a generic thriller,” an anonymous source tells LaPorte. “He was interested in making a movie that was about elegance and the glamour of stars. It was not supposed to be a hard-edged thriller. He wanted to make a style piece. That may have been a miscalculation.”

Pima County Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik‘s immediate reaction to last weekend’s Gabrielle Gifford shooting was that Tea Party rage had inflamed the atmosphere in Arizona and probably influenced unstable hinterland types like Jared Lee Loughner. “The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on this country is getting to be outrageous,” he said — a reasonable view from my perspective. And yet the right’s big-lie machine managed to discredit Dupnik’s view within 48 hours.

Their counter-attack, as always, was swift, focused, adamant, well-coordinated. “Who, us?,” they basically said. “The left is just as bad if not worse for charging that the furious, violence-implying, armed-militia tone of rightwing rhetoric since Obama’s inauguration had anything do with this nutter’s actions…how dare they suggest that we’re anything but blameless? We can inflame the political conversation as much as we want to with cries of ‘reload’ and references to Second Amendment solutions and crosshair symbols. That is our right as exceptional Americans!”

Truthout‘s Steve Striffler noted two days ago that “we are now told that because [Loughner’s] political views do not fall seamlessly into a neat box labeled ‘left’ or ‘right’ that they were irrelevant for understanding events in Arizona and, by connection, for understanding the current political situation in the United States. [For] holding muddled political views does not in and of itself necessarily make Loughner mentally ill, unstable, crazy, or even particularly unusual. It makes him American and peculiarly so.”

The likelihood that Tuscon shooter Jared Lee Loughner “was…insane, with no coherent ideological agenda, does not mean that a climate of antigovernment hysteria has no effect on him or other crazed loners out there,” says N.Y Times columnist Frank Rich in today’s column. “Nor does Loughner’s insanity mitigate the surge in unhinged political zealots acting out over the last two years.

“President Obama said, correctly, on Wednesday that “a simple lack of civility” didn’t cause the Tucson tragedy. It didn’t cause these other incidents either. What did inform the earlier violence — including the vandalism at Giffords’s office — was an antigovernment radicalism as rabid on the right now as it was on the left in the late 1960s.

“A few unexpected voices have expressed alarm. After an antigovernment gunman struck at Washington’s Holocaust museum in June 2009, Shepard Smith of Fox News noted the rising vitriol in his e-mail traffic and warned on air that more ‘amped up’ Americans could be “getting the gun out.” The former Bush administration speechwriter David Frum took on the ‘reckless right’ that August, citing the incident at the Giffords Safeway event. But when a Department of Homeland Security report warned of far-right extremism and attacks by ‘lone wolves’ that same summer, Gingrich called it a smear and John Boehner demanded an apology.

“Last week a conservative presidential candidate, Tim Pawlenty, timidly said it wouldn’t be his ‘style’ to use Palin’s target map, but was savaged so viciously by his own camp that he immediately retreated. A senior Republican senator told Politico that he saw the Tucson bloodbath as a ‘cautionary tale’ for his party, yet refused to be named.

“What are they and their peers so afraid of? No doubt that someone might reload — the same fears that prompted Gabrielle Giffords to speak up, calmly but firmly, last March. Unless and until they can match her courage and speak out too, it’s hard to see what will change.”