With the 2021 Golden Globe Awards, there is now another way the stars are just like us. They too sit at home, drink from conference calls and suffer from technical malfunctions.
Immediately after Laura Dern announced Daniel Kaluuya for Best Supporting Actor in a movie, the night’s first winner appeared on screen and began speaking. But his voice was missing. The producers cut off and Dern apologized. At the last second Kaluuya reappeared and said excitedly, “You’re making me dirty! Is that on “
After the black first prize winner was accidentally silenced, two challenges to these strange, troubled globes were summed up: the production problems of putting on a show in the midst of a deadly pandemic, and the ramifications of the lack of black artists among the nominees and Black journalists among the award-winning organization, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
The globes handled the first ones clunky, but with the occasional charm. It handled the second incompletely and even more uncomfortably.
The curiosity started before the awards. E! and NBC held “red carpet” pre-shows that did not have a red carpet. Scratch that – there was only one red carpet, and celebrity sashes were replaced with hosts conducting remote interviews outside a quiet Beverly Hilton.
The best director Regina King in a flashy metallic dress was accompanied by her dog, who was lying on a dog bed behind her. The shelves of the stars were artfully arranged and their backgrounds pleasantly blurred. It was a preshow made for both Room Rater and the Fashion Police.
The actual show started with co-hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, who made hosting the Globes easy from 2013-2015, adding simple rapport, snark and cheer to every ceremony they performed together.
The key word is “together”. This time they were socially distant from an entire continent, Fey in New York, Poehler in Los Angeles, divided together as they played in front of a small crowd of masked essential workers. Her routine leaned into madness – Fey mimicked to stroke Poehler’s hair when someone else’s arm finished work at the Hilton.
Her distance duo was surprisingly close, if not particularly sharp. (You talked a little about the HFPA’s diversity problem, a lot about how much TV and film we streamed this year.) But there was a tone on: things won’t be the same, but this year what is it?
Updated
March 1, 2021, 12:00 p.m. ET
The virtual star gallery had a few advantages. Nobody had to spend an awkwardly long time navigating from the back of a ballroom to the podium. It was adorable to see Jason Sudeikis rock a tie-dye hoodie and see the winners share the moment with their kids instead of saying goodnight from the stage.
Catherine O’Hara accepted herself as Best Actress in a TV Musical or Comedy for Schitt’s Creek, pretending to be interrupted by play-off music booming from a phone. In one of the few personal segments, Maya Rudolph and Kenan Thompson simulated an off-the-peg personal acceptance speech. And the tearful acceptance on behalf of Chadwick Boseman by his widow Taylor Simone Ledward would be unforgettable each year.
But like many of our conveyed experiences last year, the night asked to be rated on a curve. It was more fun, in a kind of “good for them that they tried it”. (The sketch with medical professionals advising celebrities in the field of telemedicine? We have already asked too many important employees this year.)
Even with champagne in the living room, conference calls are still conference calls. We spent a year staring at celebrities on screens. Spending a night watching them stare at each other in the excruciating pre-commercial multiscreen hangouts isn’t a great escape. We get enough incoherent zooms at work and at school. (Unfortunately we cannot play these out if they run for a long time.)
There was only so much the globes could do about global circumstances. How they dealt with the local circumstances for which the HFPA is responsible is a different matter.
The globes, usually greeted as a harmless, messy fool, were serious news this year for all the wrong reasons. Alongside the diversity turmoil, a recent Los Angeles Times investigation into the HFPA revealed practices that smelled of corruption, including members accepting five-star hotel stays to visit the Emily in Paris set.
The association recognized the racial problem in a superficial statement that we must work from the stage. It didn’t go into the auto trading fees at all.
The reason the globes persist is because they have become a valuable TV show that brings an army of celebrities together for NBC under one roof with lots of cork-popping social lubricant. This year’s show showed what the globes did when you take that away: not a lot.
It is unclear whether the HFPA will be healthier in a year. Hopefully the world will be. At the moment we only had bittersweet memories of the connection when producer Norman Lear accepted the Carol Burnett Award from a single room and revealed his secret for longevity: “I’ve never lived alone. I never laughed alone. “
Connecting with other people, he reminded us, is the best medicine. This was just one reason this disjointed version of a normally lighthearted production felt sick.
