by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark
My husband Charles and I watched the 2021 Golden Globe Awards show on NBC, which given that the 2020 award-show cycle happened just before the reign of SARS-CoV-2 and the strictures this virus has imposed on just about all human life was the first example we’ve seen of a major awards show being staged in the era of “social distancing” (a phrase I still can’t stand!). The hosts were Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, but they were in different cities – one was in a theatre in Hollywood and one was in the Rainbow Room of Rockefeller Center in New York (which when it opened in 1935 was a nightclub that advertised itself as “Sixty-Five Stories Nearer the Stars,” and years later George T. Simon recalled, “Formal dress was obligatory and the prices were also 65 stories nearer the stars”). Fey was in New York, Poehler in Hollywood, and about the only way you could tell them apart – since they were hosting from identical sets – is that Fey is dark-haired and Poehler is blonde.
The Globes muted the festivities and to my mind went on and on and on responding to a recent revelation in the Los Angeles Times that none of the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which both sponsors the Golden Globes and actually votes the awards, contains no members of visibly African descent. (I put “visibly” in that to acknowledge that since all the oldest human fossils have been found in Africa, we are all of African descent.) Times reporter Anita Chabria was still kvetching about that this morning, claiming that “the entirety of the response was six sentences split among three people and took up under a minute of the show” – which was odd because it seemed to me like both the organizers and the awardees spent much of the evening flagellating themselves in public over the alleged lack of “inclusion.” My sympathies are strongly with anyone who critiques racism in any way, shape or form, but this demand for “inclusion” quotas is really going too far – especially since if the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has anything against African-descended people, you couldn’t tell it by who actually won the awards. One of the acting categories featured an actress who played Billie Holiday beating out an actress who played Ma Rainey, and quite a few of the other recipients were visibly Black and were getting awards for films whose plots centered around Blackness and the issues it puts people through.
The Globes were pretty much just another awards show, and though it divides its awards into categories for movies and TV – as well as between “drama” and “comedy/musical” (the latter meant that Hamilton had to run against Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm for the Best Comedy/Musical Film, and Sacha Baron Cohen’s stupid sequel actually beat out the blockbuster musical that had been an enormous hit on stage and, unlike such previous films of huge stage musical successes like A Chorus Line and Cats, actually got good reviews and from all accounts did justice to its source) – the closure of virtually all movie theatres and their replacement by “video streaming” has blurred the distinction between the two big-time. It’s also meant that awards shows have gone from awarding movies and TV shows I haven’t seen to awarding movies and TV shows I can’t see – not without spending a lot of money subscribing to streaming channels and paying for a few good titles amidst a lot of crap. Also, my experiences with streaming the one channel I do subscribe to, Amazon Prime, have not been good – minor glitches in my Internet connection that go unnoticed when I’m just surfing the Web turn off the streaming signal and require an awful lot of button-pushing to get it back on.
This may be the fault of my Internet connection, but it still doesn’t make me look fondly on this technology or stop me resenting the way it’s pushing the home entertainment industry away from selling physical media towards this evanescent “streaming” business in which you don’t buy a physical product, just a “license” to watch something that can be revoked at any time for any reason the corporate gods decide. The Best Film: Drama was Nomadland, directed by Chloe Zhao (a woman who beat out two other women and two men for Best Director) and starring Frances McDormand in a story about people who drive around the country and deliberately don’t live in any particular place. It seems to me that movies like that are wish-fulfillment fantasies in the SARS-CoV-2 era: audiences that aren’t allowed actually to go anywhere themselves can live vicariously through these people who have built their entire lives around travel and impermanence. I had fun watching the Golden Globes but awards shows tend to be lumbering spectacles anyway, and the business of having music start during people’s acceptance speeches to signal they’ve gone on too long looks even tackier when the people being “played off” are at the other end of a Zoom connection – though it would be even tackier if they simply dropped them from the connection and consigned them to electronic oblivion in mid-sentence!
