Golden Globe Reactions
By Joe Boden
19th January 2010

And so, the sixty seventh Golden Globe award ceremony is in the books, and if my reaction to the list of nominations was negative (check out that particular column, co-written by Rob, here), then the reaction to the winners is even more so. However, I don’t think either reaction will particularly be going against the grain; this year’s Globes winners are one of the most disappointingly predictable in recent memory, and that’s not to mention just plain wrong. The Globes are usually a pretty good pre-cursor of the big ones, the Academy Awards, but we can but hope that this year will be quite different.

Let’s begin with the biggest prize of the night, the Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama. Of the five films nominated, I haven’t particularly loved any of them. “The Hurt Locker” was mildly powerful and quite engaging, “Up in the Air” lacked impact, and “Inglourious Basterds” was pretty entertaining but artistically barren (let’s not get into how morally contemptible it is). “Precious” was too awards baity in its approach, and its approach to this type of conventional melodrama is too unoriginal to be impactful. If there was one film that definitely did not deserve to win, it was the bloated, ugly, horribly overlong and ‘just plain wrong’ “Avatar”, or; James Cameron’s Sci-Fi Epic Game Changer. It was twelve years since Cameron swept the board at both the Academy Awards and the Globes with “Titanic”, a film that was conventionally awards bating. “Avatar” is also an awards baiter, merging big budget epic sensibilities with the Awards selector’s favourite themes (it’s basically an American frontier story set in space), and it has seemingly been successful. It’s one of the most financially successful films of all-time, and now it looks like it’s going to go down in the history books as an Awards winner.

Now here is where the Academy Awards has a chance to prove why it is so better regarded than the Globes, and not reward this bloated, cheesy, conventional nightmare with yet more silverware. It wouldn’t be a surprise, though, if it did. Let’s face it; “Slumdog Millionaire” won last year, and it’s very possible that the Academy could have a private bet with themselves to achieve the almost impossible, and reward a film even worse than Danny Boyle’s. It’s incredible that in a year with so many great films both outside of the box (“Antichrist”, “35 Shots of Rum”) and inside of it (“A Serious Man”, “Up”, “The Road”), the most likely winner of the biggest award is a ridiculously naïve and just-plain-bad film about nothing in particular. But anyway, back to the Globes…

Cameron also picked up the Best Director Award, rather predictably (picture and director tend to go almost hand in hand), over a handful of likely suspects (Eastwood, Reitman, Tarantino, Bigelow). But enough about him, let’s get back to the Motion Picture awards, with the other major globe going to “The Hangover”. “Julie and Julia” was hardly any better, but the fact that the quite-good “Nine” was nominated makes this somewhat of a surprise. The cynical part of me thinks that the Globes are simply pandering to the everyday movie goer, and in doing so they’ve neglected what is the far superior film. “Nine” is hardly the masterpiece that “8 ½” is, but it’s still leagues ahead of a nonsense popcorn picture like “The Hangover”, simply because it has something… anything… to say other than a bunch of unfunny, obvious cock jokes. It’s unreal that Ed Helms could be in something this bad.

"The Hangover", winner of the Best Picture - Comedy or Musical.

It was nice to see Jeff Bridges get some recognition in the acting category, but I’ll reserve judgement until I see “Crazy Heart” until I say it was deserved. The same goes for Sandra Bullock with “The Blind Side” (apart from the ‘nice to see’ bit), but the Comedy/Musical categories yield yet more disappointing results. Robert Downey Junior was actually quite good in “Sherlock Holmes”, so I’m not really up in arms about his victory (it’s always nice to see him get some recognition), but he was nominated alongside two much more deserved competitors. Daniel Day-Lewis was superb in “Nine”, with his performance as a man undergoing both creative block and a mid-life crisis being one of the very best things about Marshall’s film. Even better was Michael Stuhlbarg in the Coens’ under-represented “A Serious Man”, but both were pushed aside in favour of Downey Jr’s more conventional turn as Holmes. The actress award went to Meryl Streep, which is really quite infuriating, especially when Cotillard – who shined even brighter than Day-Lewis – was nominated in the same category.

The supporting categories are another mixed back. Christoph Waltz was indeed fantastic in “Inglourious Basterds”, picking up the big award at Cannes (even though Willem Dafoe certainly deserved it more), and if anything from that film deserved recognition, it was him. Mo’Nique picked up the Best Supporting Actress award for her unbelievably base, shallow, and empty performance in “Precious”. The screenplay award went – quite deservedly – to Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner for the quite good “Up in the Air”, which beat out “Inglourious Basterds”, “The Hurt Locket”, and “District 9” to the prize. The best original score prize went to “Up”, which is a relief. The score was the worst thing about “Avatar”, and to see that recognized even with a nomination was particularly painful. My own choice for the award would have been “Where the Wild Things Are”, but “Up” is hardly a disappointing victor.

Down at the very bottom of the list of winners were the two most deserved ones. The Best Animated Film went to “Up”, which was actually my third favourite film of the year, and certainly a film that deserved some form of silverware. The Best Foreign Language film went to “The White Ribbon”, which was again in keeping with my hopes. “A Prophet” wouldn’t have been a bad choice, but I feared that the good-but-inferior “Broken Embraces” was going to pick up the award. Almodovar is a safe foreign choice for these things, but it’s nice to see the worthy Haneke winning out the day.

And so now we must look on towards the BAFTAs, and perhaps on to the Oscars too. These final two films are in good stead, really, and with the news that the Oscars are nominating ten films for their biggest prize, it’s not completely unreasonable to suggest that both “The White Ribbon” and “Up” are in line for some much deserved recognition. It’s still, though, a long time before a film like “Antichrist” gets the recognition that it deserves, and last night was yet more proof that these awards aren’t worth the gold they are made out of.