THE LAST DUEL as Best Musical/Comedy and Taking the Keys from Grampa
Coming into adulthood can bring a thoughtful re-examination of a great many things. One of those personal elements that gets a new contextualisation as a grown up is the more layered understanding of grandparents. Grandparents appear to be ancient when one is fourteen, but adulthood makes one appreciate that Grandma and Grampa really weren’t all that timeworn back then; they’re timeworn now probably, and for a great many, a generation or two past their prime. This realisation summons both positive personal reflection as our brain ventures down memory lane, but it also conjures feelings of melancholy in pondering the practical problems of aging bodies and dated attitudes falling behind a world that keeps spinning around them.
Which brings us to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and more specifically, its annual Golden Globes ceremony. The awards ceremony has always had the hallmark of being a big deal. The Golden Globes, perceptually, has long been a notch or two below the Oscars and the BAFTAs, even though it doesn’t take a deep dive of research into the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to discover that they themselves don’t have much more credibility than, say, a municipal film critics’ circle or a local Lion’s Club for that matter. The $45M that they brag on their website about giving away to charities is over a nearly 30-year period and represents a pittance of its revenue. They’re a pretty small outfit, truth be told. About one hundred members, and a staff of six. However, the Golden Globes ceremony has always felt – artificial as it is – like a big deal, a glamourous night on the calendar, and it’s all courtesy of NBC’s perennial broadcast. If it’s on TV, it matters. So, the Golden Globes, it turns out, are a lot like some of those aging grandparents and are getting a fresh analysis from today’s more skeptical public. When we were younger, we shared special, memorable moments with them. However, amidst all the fond memories and cute follies – be they Jim Carrey’s brilliant acceptance speeches, Brad Pitt’s thanking Kaopectate (his diarrhea medicine), Elizabeth Taylor’s drunken appearance as a presenter, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s polished comic hosting gigs, or Ving Rhames’ consigning his award to fellow nominee Jack Lemmon – the HFPA, behind the scenes, is actually just a sketchy clique whose self-service seems to have been steadily outweighing its community service for quite some time.
Mercifully, as it turns out, having a huge American network come in to broadcast your swanky annual glad-handing is a privilege, not a right. As most people who actually care know, NBC has decided to take the keys to the ‘first-Sunday-after-New-Year’s’ time slot away from this antiquated press group because of their systemic and historic lack of diversity. Maybe though, this should have happened a long ago. It must be stunning enough a situation for a well-established, aged body to be told its views and practices are no longer contemporary or acceptable, much less to be punished for it. But when Scarlett Johansson joined the criticism, and Tom Cruise went so far as to return his Golden Globe statues to HFPA headquarters, things must have begun feeling pretty real and painful for the non-profit organisation. After all, according to the clickbait articles everywhere Johansson is the greatest box office actress of all time – debatable, but whatever – and Cruise is arguably the longest-standing, high-profile, bankable leading man in the history of the modern box office – again, debatable, but not a totally stupid claim. One could easily argue that star-power in Hollywood isn’t the big deal in marketing movies that it once was, but the HFPA is one group that doesn’t likely buy into the theory of dwindling Hollywood royalty. So, to the HFPA, being spurned by Cruise and Johansson must have felt a bit like being bluntly told that their dear son and granddaughter wouldn’t be coming home for Christmas, like ever.
However, if we’re being totally honest and forget the issues of alleged racism, corruption, and lack of diversity – because older organizations can be after all, ‘set in their ways’ and ‘products of their generation’ – the HFPA has been showing signs of senility for years, and the Golden Globes haven’t really been deserving of their prominent placement in the awards season for quite sometime, so it’s not a bad thing that NBC took the keys away from Grampa Golden Globe.
If the lack of diversity issue hadn’t arisen, speaking to much larger internal social problems, last year’s roster of chaotic Golden Globe film nominations would arguably have been the equivalent of the ‘serious episode’ that could have lead to cutting them off. Like when a driver of diminishing faculties has a car accident, family and friends need to respond to the consequences and risks of the diminished capacity, and sometimes this means taking away someone’s keys. Tragic as it may be, despite all the good times that folks have had cheering and jeering Globe winners over the decades, the only conclusion possible from 2020’s list of nominees is that the Hollywood Foreign Press doesn’t have a sweet clue what they’re doing, and they really should not be in the driver’s seat of one of the most-watched televised entertainment awards shows in the world.
Undeniably, film quality in 2020 suffered immensely from the industry realities of the pandemic. However, the diminishing capacity of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to articulate some semblance of debatable quality in appropriate categories speaks to how lost and scattered their voice is. Minari is the high-profile ‘WTF’. Regardless of HFPA rules around language, Lee Isaac Chung’s film is an American film by an American filmmaker, and it deserves its place alongside the domestic Best Pictures. The supposed language rules didn’t tamp down Babel’s nomination and win in 2007, so what gives here? Without popularity cues from the box office or award-season networking events, the voters seemed to have absolutely NO clue what to nominate in its film categories. Rosamund Pike, for instance, was nominated and won for I Care A Lot, a film that was released to streaming services moments before voting, had an audience for a month, and hasn’t been seen or talked about since.
Another awkward shot in the dark appearing on the Globes nominations list: Music, the clumsy musical about autism and childish adult behaviour. How exactly this film – a tone-deaf fusion of Sia’s “Chandelier” music video and Rain Man – got nominated for Best Musical or Comedy is one of the great mysteries of 2021. Having nothing else to go by – limited festival feedback, no box office, no film-studio lobbyists, or swag bags from distributors at cocktail parties – it feels that the HFPA were simply rushed to nominate something, so they wouldn’t leave any Best Picture categories with fewer than the usual five nominees. Like a student ill-prepared for the test he’s writing. Don’t leave questions blank; put in something. Ditto for The Prom, an adapted-from-Broadway, solidly panned, sloppy musical nominated for Best Picture Musical or Comedy. But if a film adapted from a Broadway musical wasn’t awkward enough, the live-stage recording of Hamilton was also nominated, blurring the lines of what’s film and what’s stage.
The illogical, nonsensical decisions by the HFPA have always been there, but not so many at a time. The HFPA’s credibility is wobbly at best when you look through the annals of their celebrated nominees and winners. The Best Picture categories have long been places to find bizarre and controversial selections. In all likelihood, the nominations are driven as much by name recognition, informal buzz, and lobbying rather than merit or the idea that the HFPA voters have actually seen all the films. For example, it’s hard to imagine that Emilio Estevez’s 2006 film Bobby got recognised in the Best Drama category for any other reason besides the reputation of its extensive and accomplished cast. Then there’s The Tourist scandal, the 2010 spy film that became a Best Musical-Comedy nominee allegedly following a bribery campaign that culminated in voters receiving expense-paid trips to Las Vegas for a Cher concert. But again, the Globes generally didn’t typically have more than a one or two bizarro, inexplicable film nominations per year – that is, until 2020’s list of nominees came along.
The Golden Globes regularly have deserved eye rolls and headshakes with the films that they have inexplicably classified as either dramas, musicals, or comedies over the years. Green Book: musical. The Big Short: comedy. Vice: comedy. Bohemian Rhapsody: drama rather than musical. Really? Sometimes this Globes’ specific debate of comedy-musical versus drama ends up becoming a loophole/backdoor means to bestow love and accolades upon accomplished creatives in the world of film. Whether a film is actually a drama or not is beside the point. Like other film critics’ groups, the HFPA enjoy celebrating the work of likable and established veterans in the field. It probably makes the HFPA feel good as if they’re also validating their own position as gatekeepers of such achievement-based honours. How else can one explain The Martian not only being nominated but winning the Best Picture and Best Actor awards in Best Musical or Comedy? Comedy? It would appear to be a way to shower love onto Ridley Scott, whose film just wasn’t going to stand a chance in the drama category alongside The Revenant, Room, Spotlight, and Mad Max. Similarly, awarding Matt Damon with the Best Actor in a Comedy feels like nothing more than a reason to finally give an acting award to Damon after five previous nominations and five previous losses. It may be fun for the HFPA to spread to love to accomplished artists, but the accolades feel somewhat tainted – don’t they? – when a lonely survival drama is labeled a comedy.
So after serving up a series of doddering illogical nominees over the years and a desperate flying off the road on 2020’s list of film nominees, it’s a good thing that NBC revoked the Golden Globes’ driver’s license, for a few years at least, while the HFPA takes some time to reflect and maybe get better. It’s hard to say whether or not Globes voters of the future will be able to avoid corruption or manage to reflect a more diverse view in its future nominees. Despite signs of the industry getting back to normal, things aren’t there yet. If the nominations of 2020 were any indication, one has to wonder if HFPA voters – after one look at the hairdos and facial hair of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon in The Last Duel along with their love of Ridley Scott being Ridley Scott – would wind up awarding the film a Best Picture-Musical or Comedy nomination alongside a co-nominee such as Come From Away on Apple TV+. Perhaps society’s increasingly equity-minded diversity police did a favour in sidelining the aging Globes before their full-on organisational senility and film-IQ infirmity was fully realised.