Monday, January 07, 2019

Surviving The Golden Globs

Last night, wife kitteh watched the Golden Glob Awards. I managed to avoid most of it, but had to sit through the last 45 minutes or so. It was only mildly horrible, ameliorated by the fact that I'd heard all of the speeches before. Out of the six years those 45 minutes took, three things jumped out at me.
  • Some aging witch won best actress for the movie, "The Wife." She got up and told us all how her dad was oppressive and how her mother never was able to pursue her dreams, whatever those were. From this, we were supposed to generalize that women have terrible lives, thanks to the patriarchy.

    She didn't mention what dad did for a living. Maybe he pursued his passions by repairing high tension power lines in western Massachusetts in the middle of winter. Maybe he shoved a lawnmower around the hillsides of Mississippi in July. Whatever it was, he was living high on the patriarchal hog while mom stayed home, a slave.
     
  • Speaking of slavery, there was a winning movie about a black musician and a white bigot traveling the South together in 1960. Ah, 1960. A sacred year, that. We love movies out of 1960, it's the height of Jim Crow which we were told is still with us and, as the winner said in his speech, possibly even worse today. Right.

    Funny thing about the Jim Crow laws. They were laws, as in rules enforced by the government  meant to keep a population in line, a population which might break them. The government feared that individuals, allowed to act as individuals, would fraternize across racial lines. These same activist Hollywood types love the government and love regulations. Careful riding that tiger, boys and girls. You could always discover that the massively powerful government decides to throw you off and eat you, the way it IRS-ate conservatives under Obama. It all depends on the current mood of the tiger, doesn't it?
     
  • Love was mentioned several times as a motivating factor. Love for everyone! The forces of Hate are all around us and we must resist them, but not with love. No, the forces of Hate must be resisted with hate and the "untold" stories that every nominated movie was telling in ALL CAPS and every speech was extolling in ALL CAPS must be told. And told. And told. And told. Good Lord, it was boring.
At the end, wife kitteh shocked me. She said, "That was awful." Having learned to avoid snarking during these things - she's more important than having my obnoxious opinions aired - I asked why she thought that. She said the hosts weren't funny. I could have added that it's kind of hard to be funny while wagging your finger at the camera, but I think we both knew that.

I have no idea who these ciphers were, but they hosted the show. Badly.

3 comments:

tim eisele said...

To be honest, I never saw the appeal of watching those sorts of shows in the first place*, but if even the normal fans of them are deciding that they are no fun to watch, their days may be numbered.

*I watched the Academy Awards once (my college housemates had it on), and I mainly remember that it was long and pointless, with a lot of people I didn't care about talking about a lot of movies that I mostly hadn't seen. And that Chariots of Fire (a movie that I understand is mostly about guys in running shorts) beat Excalibur for "Costume Design", which I thought at the time was ludicrous. So, it must have been 1982.

Mostly Nothing said...

I have never understood why people care about this stuff.
Awards for people that can't do anything, but pretend to do things that real people do; awarded by other people that can't do anything. Sounds great.

Which group of people that can't do anything award the GGs? It's not the Academy of people that can't do anything...

Eponymous said...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Close
Early life and family
Close was born on March 19, 1947 in Greenwich, Connecticut, to William Taliaferro Close, a doctor who operated a clinic in the Belgian Congo and served as a personal physician to Zaire's ruler Mobutu Sese Seko, and socialite Bettine Moore Close. She has two sisters, Tina and Jessie, and two brothers, Alexander (nicknamed Sandy) and Tambu Misoki, whom Close's parents adopted while living in Africa.

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/film-tv/a25770458/glenn-close-golden-globes-acceptance-speech/
To play a character who is so internal, I’m thinking of my mom who really sublimated herself to my father her whole life. And in her 80s she said to me, "I feel like I haven’t accomplished anything."And it was so not right.