Cold-hearted Orb Which Rules The Night

I have studiously avoided paying any attention to the Golden Globes this year, as I do every year. It's not that the Globes are less legitimate than the Oscars; indeed they're both equally bogus. However, I only have so much time to devote to this kind of nonsense, and I've made my choice.

I've got a tab open in my browser (Firefox, and even THAT'S a more interesting choice) to the nominees and winners, in case I feel compelled to refer to it as I write this. Looking over there, the one thing I'll say about the Globes is they have the sense to keep comedy and drama apart from each other, and they lump film and television into one awards show. That's good because it give the film and TV people a chance to rub elbows; I bet there would never have been a single Jenna Elfman movie had there not been Golden Globes. Conversely, would we have seen James Woods in SHARK without the Globes?

Oh yeah, I hate SHARK and find Jenna Elfman perky but irritating.

"Perky but irritating"... is there ever a need to use "but" instead of "and" in that construction? Interesting.

Also interesting is the fact that, looking over the list, the TV nominees seem far more compelling than the film ones. BABEL just looks like award-mongering to me; I'd never consider actually seeing it. MRS. HARRIS on the other hand was fascinating. THE DEPARTED had its moments but you got the feeling that everyone involved was dashing out takes between phone calls, and Scorcese gets all his best material out of the Hong Kong action movie he's remaking. It's a sleepwalk.

As for the other 4 TV movies, so are they, but it's 8 on the film talley. The comedies make up the good material there. BORAT and THANK YOU FOR SMOKING were the opposite of sleepwalks, they were tightrope walks. Both boasted horrible yet sympathetic lead characters, and both were virtual fonts of ugly truths about all of us, made palatable, nay delicious, by deft comic handling. Plus one of the two featured a brilliant sight gag involving a bear's head, though at this point I can't remember which one.

DREAMGIRLS? Not as much fun as CHICAGO. DEVIL WEARS PRADA? Pedestrian. LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE? As familiar as it was delightful.

By the way, pity poor Leonaro DiCaprio, who aced himself out of two awards and still lost to someone else, and Helen Mirren, who was against herself in so many catagories that she's going to spend the next year musing about what she did wrong in THAT performance, the one where she didn't win.

I guess that in an awards environment, it is fair to expect the nominees to have a little experience under their belt - maybe you want a genre piece that's the best example of the genre ever. Which is fine, but boring to yours truely. I want genre-bending. I want postcards from the edge, where they haven't even built the genre yet. I want entertainment that is so new that you can't recognize that they're doing award-quality work.

Some movies are bedtime stories, entertaining because you know exactly what's going to happen and when; and those movies win the big awards. I don't like bedtime stories.