I’ll say this much for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association: they know how to get people talking.
The nominees for the 2016 Golden Globes were announced this morning, and as usual it’s a mixture of artistic appreciation and blatant pandering, as the HFPA bends over backwards to invite as many shiny people to their party as they can.
It’s great to see Mad Max: Fury Road up for Best Picture (Drama) alongside expected choices like Carol, The Revenant, Room and Spotlight. But over in the Comedy Or Musical section of the film awards, we’ve got Joy and The Martian squeezed in alongside The Big Short, Spy and Trainwreck.
This complicates things, because Joy and The Martian aren’t comedies. But they do have big stars in them – ensembles of them, in fact – and the HFPA wants Jennifer Lawrence and Jessica Chastain and Matt Damon and Robert De Niro and Chiwetel Ejiofor and Bradley Cooper and Kate Mara and Jeff Daniels at their party. So they’ve found a way to bring them there, even nominating Damon and Lawrence as best actor and best actress, Comedy Or Musical – for performances that spend a lot more time on weepy resolve and steely competence, respectively.
It doesn’t stop there, either. Mark Ruffalo is up for Best Actor in the Comedy Or Musical category, too – for his performance as a husband and father struggling profoundly with bipolar disorder in Infinitely Polar Bear. It’s terrific work, but it’s not funny in the slightest seeing him there just makes me wonder whether HFPA voters even watched the movie before filling out their ballots.
On the TV side, they’re still playing games with definitions, classifying the ongoing shows Luther, Fargo and American Horror Story as miniseries so they can nominate Idris Elba, Patrick Wilson, Kirsten Dunst and Lady Gaga for acting awards. I mean, whatever, right? Except, as with shifting serious pictures into Comedy Or Musical division, it slights the people who actually did the work that properly fits within those parameters.
Why even have categories in the first place? Just throw a party, invite the people you want to invite and let them all make speeches. The longer the show goes, the drunker everyone gets and the more fun the speeches become. And everybody wins. Literally.
