Welcome to the show folks...
Awards season is upon us like a rutting moose on an unsuspecting lawn chair, and like that moose and the lawn chair, everyone's going to feel a little worse for wear when it's over.
The opening salvo is the release of the nominees for the Golden Globes by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), and it's bringing out everyone's inner bastard.
For those who don't know, the HFPA is a perfect microcosm of everything that's wrong with Hollywood based awards. The voting pool is small, only about 95 members, this same voting pool is notoriously easy to sway, their management, methods and motives behind the granting of nominations and awards is more secretive than the Freemasons, and the people in Hollywood take the Golden Globes waaaaay too seriously.
It wasn't always that way. Back yonder in days of yore the Golden Globes was treated more like a roast than an awards show, the stars would get drunk, make fun of each other, and everyone would have a good time, and not take them very seriously. In fact, they refused to take it seriously, because there was absolutely no way it could be taken seriously because the system behind it was so capricious and silly from the start.
Oh, how things have changed.
You see some time ago someone noticed that once in a while Golden Globe winners would also win Oscars. Suddenly a primarily fun social event, became deadly serious business, an attitude that got even worse when they started televising the Golden Globes as a sort of pre-Academy Awards playoff game.
The capricious and system didn't change one whit, but the campaigning, finagling, and outright bribery burst out exponentially.
The Oscars aren't that much better, being decided by a slightly larger, yet even more elitist group, that might not be convinced by the outright bribery, but they can be swayed via other means that have nothing to do with the quality of the work in question.
I also love the emergence of the annual tradition of pre-awards hyping, sniping, and blatant griping. Not only are the denizens of the Axis of Ego pushing for their own awards, they are trying to bad-mouth the competition out of the game. They are calling each other spendthrifts, anti-semites, racists, sexists, homophobes, homophones, and if they're really feeling nasty: closet Republicans.
In the case of that lovable teddy bear Harvey Weinstein, he's being sniped and griped by the very same people who should be hyping him and their film Inglorious Bastards. Apparently, someone at the Weinstein Co. (but not Harvey) didn't fill in a form correctly and lo and behold, all of Harvey's partners, the very same people who plucked the film from TWC's financial meltdown, and got it made and into theaters, were left out from the nominations.
What a coincidence.
Anyway, let the games begin, because the politicking, pimping, and back-stabbing usually turns out to be way more entertaining than the movies their supposed to be honoring.
*Knock Knock*
Whose at my door?
Kate Winslet?
POW!
Ow, my ass!
Awards season is upon us like a rutting moose on an unsuspecting lawn chair, and like that moose and the lawn chair, everyone's going to feel a little worse for wear when it's over.
The opening salvo is the release of the nominees for the Golden Globes by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), and it's bringing out everyone's inner bastard.
For those who don't know, the HFPA is a perfect microcosm of everything that's wrong with Hollywood based awards. The voting pool is small, only about 95 members, this same voting pool is notoriously easy to sway, their management, methods and motives behind the granting of nominations and awards is more secretive than the Freemasons, and the people in Hollywood take the Golden Globes waaaaay too seriously.
It wasn't always that way. Back yonder in days of yore the Golden Globes was treated more like a roast than an awards show, the stars would get drunk, make fun of each other, and everyone would have a good time, and not take them very seriously. In fact, they refused to take it seriously, because there was absolutely no way it could be taken seriously because the system behind it was so capricious and silly from the start.
Oh, how things have changed.
You see some time ago someone noticed that once in a while Golden Globe winners would also win Oscars. Suddenly a primarily fun social event, became deadly serious business, an attitude that got even worse when they started televising the Golden Globes as a sort of pre-Academy Awards playoff game.
The capricious and system didn't change one whit, but the campaigning, finagling, and outright bribery burst out exponentially.
The Oscars aren't that much better, being decided by a slightly larger, yet even more elitist group, that might not be convinced by the outright bribery, but they can be swayed via other means that have nothing to do with the quality of the work in question.
I also love the emergence of the annual tradition of pre-awards hyping, sniping, and blatant griping. Not only are the denizens of the Axis of Ego pushing for their own awards, they are trying to bad-mouth the competition out of the game. They are calling each other spendthrifts, anti-semites, racists, sexists, homophobes, homophones, and if they're really feeling nasty: closet Republicans.
In the case of that lovable teddy bear Harvey Weinstein, he's being sniped and griped by the very same people who should be hyping him and their film Inglorious Bastards. Apparently, someone at the Weinstein Co. (but not Harvey) didn't fill in a form correctly and lo and behold, all of Harvey's partners, the very same people who plucked the film from TWC's financial meltdown, and got it made and into theaters, were left out from the nominations.
What a coincidence.
Anyway, let the games begin, because the politicking, pimping, and back-stabbing usually turns out to be way more entertaining than the movies their supposed to be honoring.
*Knock Knock*
Whose at my door?
Kate Winslet?
POW!
Ow, my ass!
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