by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night when it was 5 p.m. I was ready to watch the blessedly live
telecast of the Golden Globe Awards. (Thank goodness for the Internet and the
rise of social media, which has led at least some awards shows to reject the
way we viewers on the West Coast for decades were palmed off with a
three-hours-later rebroadcast instead of getting to see the shows in real
time.) Last night’s 76th annual Golden Globe Awards were a
relatively low-keyed show — the hosts, Andy Samberg and Sandra Oh, took a
self-deprecating line and avoided the slashing insults of previous Globe hosts
(can you say “Ricky Gervais”?), making fun mostly of themselves. One of their
best bits was when they announced they were going to show emotional highlights
from previous Globe shows — but then the only clips they showed were of awards
they themselves had won. (Later Oh won another one and had to make a quick and
odd transition from host to recipient.) Their best joke, when they weren’t
making fun of themselves, came when Samberg announced that the film Vice, about Dick Cheney (Christian “Batman” Bale — who
astonished me in his acceptance speech when he spoke with a thick British
accent he has totally eradicated when playing Americans) and his role in the
administration of George W. Bush (Sam “Moon” Rockwell), was a drama but was
nominated in the best comedy or musical film category because “it invaded the
wrong category based on faulty intelligence.” (Meanwhile, the Queen biopic Bohemian
Rhapsody, which was obviously a musical,
was nominated for — and actually won — Best Motion Picture, Drama.)
It’s hard
to judge an awards show when you haven’t seen most of the products being
nominated — virtually all the TV series the Globes nominate these days air on
streaming channels so I couldn’t watch them even if I wanted to (I have stuck
with a cable connection rather than deal with the world of “streaming” services
and the elaborate interfaces between TV’s, computers, smartphones and whatnot
needed to watch them, at least partly because I suspect signing up for Amazon
Prime and Netflix and Hulu and
CBS All Access and all the other ones out there would add up to considerably
more money per month than a cable bill and would cut me off from a lot of news
and other channels I do watch
regularly), and since Charles and I almost never go to movie theatres anymore
but wait for things to emerge on DVD (and a lot of the films the “streaming”
services produce don’t ever make
it to DVD because the companies want subscribing to their services to be the only way you can watch their programs, which just gives
me an even sourer view of the “streaming” world than I had before) we haven’t
seen most of the movies, either. Charles did get to see the film Green Book when he last visited his family in the San Francisco
Bay Area, and it won last night for Best Picture (Comedy or Musical) even
though from the subject matter (the great jazz pianist Don Shirley — presented
in the film as a frustrated would-be classical piano virtuoso forced to play
jazz for a living because he’s Black (that wasn’t my impression of the real Don
Shirley at all; I played my poor-quality dub of his first album on Cadence, Don
Shirley Trio, for Charles and asked him if
what was heard in the movie had any resemblance to Shirley’s actual music, and
he said no) — and the film’s focus, his white “minder” who had to drive him on
a tour of the Deep South in 1962. Green Book also won an award for
Mahershala Ali (Oakland-born despite his African-sounding name), who played
Shirley; and for the writing team of Nick Vallelonga, Peter Farrelly (who also
directed) and Brian Hayes Currie — and what I didn’t know before (though
Charles did) is that Nick Vallelonga is the real-life son of the white lead
Viggo Mortenson (redeeming his career after it suffered from his casting in Gus
Van Sant’s insane remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho) played in the film. I guess you’re already two
steps ahead of the game when you can base your film on a true story that
happened to your dad!
In an era in which “inclusion” has become a fetish word
for at least half of America, there weren’t any direct attacks on President
Trump the way Meryl Streep did two years ago (and got named in a Trump tweet as
“overrated” even though she’s won more Academy Award nominations than any other
actor, living or dead, male or female) but there were a lot of veiled references to walls (bad) and bridges
(good) and how art is a force that brings people together. Alfonso Cuarón
turned his acceptance speech for Roma, a Mexican production that won for Best Foreign-Language Film, into a
plea for inclusion as well as a defense of his native country against all the
attacks certain people in public power have been making against it and its
people. I have no idea what Roma
is about — the title suggests either a film about European Gypsies or about the
Italian capital (like Fellini’s marvelous 1972 film of the same title) but
imdb.com’s brief synopsis says it “chronicles a year in the life of a
middle-class family's maid in Mexico City in the early 1970’s.” (I remember
seeing the film Seven Women, One Homosexual and Carlos a while back and being amazed that there was a movie
out there acknowledging that Mexico has a middle class and isn’t just a handful of padrones and a lot of peons living in dire poverty and aching
for the chance to become undocumented immigrants to the U.S.) Like other awards
shows, even a relatively apolitical one like this year’s Golden Globes gives me
the impression that in this heavily (and, at least according to the closeness
of the 2018 midterm election results, just about evenly) divided country,
artists generally are part of the group that values inclusion over exclusion
and acknowledges the equality of women, people of color and Queers (though
Hollywood often talks a better
game on that than they actually play — one routine during the show said that
when producers are hiring a director they first consider a man, and if no man
is available they look for two men, and if no two men are available they look
for a group of men, and if they aren’t available they just might consider a woman — and this was delivered in a
growling voice that suggested John Wayne as Godzilla and made the point even
funnier and more incisive).
It was indicative of how inclusive the
entertainment industry has become — this slice of it, at least — that there
were an awful lot of African-descended faces accepting awards and three of the
films nominated for Best Motion Picture — Drama, Black Panther,
BlackkKlansman and If Beale
Street Could Talk, had largely Black casts
(though the winner, Bohemian Rhapsody, was one of the two, along with the fourth version of A Star
Is Born — fifth if you count the 1932 What
Price Hollywood, which had essentially the
same plot but split the Norman Maine character into two people — that didn’t,
though I guess Bohemian Rhapsody counted
as at least half a film about a person of color because Freddie Mercury was
part-British and part-Turkish). During the show I posted a couple of tweets
(aimed, I’ll admit, largely at Charles) praising the two winners who pronounced
the “t” in “often” during their acceptance speeches (one of them a woman who
made the demand that all
employers, not just in the entertainment industry, commit to making 50 percent
of their workforces female — it’s indicative of how far we have to go on
women’s equality in the workplace that the newly sworn-in 116th
Congress is being taken as a model of inclusivity because over 100 members of
the House of Representatives are women, but that’s less than a quarter of the
House in a country where women are slightly more than 50 percent of the population). Awards shows are
lumbering beasts generally, and this one was no exception — it ran 22 minutes
over its scheduled three hours, and so I didn’t watch the Lifetime movie I’d
planned to turn to after it was over and looked for other stuff on the “tube”
instead.
