Thursday 9 December 2010

Hollywood Babble On & On #644: Hollywood Foreign Prostitutes Association?

Welcome to the show folks...

It's December, and with the certainty of the tides comes the annual griping about Awards Season. This week TV producer Peter Tolan said this about Hollywood Foreign Press Association
and the Golden Globes:
"just a group of whores from other countries... I'm not prone to hyperbole, but the Foreign Press [Assn] really is a bunch of whores. They can be bought... It's really an excuse to go out with people who don't speak English that well and maybe win a trinket. [A Golden Globe] means shit. Fuck the Globes."
The HFPA is a bunch of whores that can be bought.

Let's just file that under "Well d'uh!"

In the grand schematic of the multiverse Hollywood based award, be they from Associations, Academies, Guilds, Circles, Clubs, and Covens, are all essentially meaningless trinkets that have more to do with the maneuvering of the nominees and the prejudices of the nominators than actual quality of the films and the integrity of the process.

The problem is that Hollywood takes these damn things too damn seriously.

I end up saying this every year, the worst thing to happen to the Golden Globes was when the press thought it was some sort of predictor for the Oscars. Sure, sometimes it did honor films that went on to win Oscars, but that's the same logic that tells you to base your schedule on a broken clock because it's right twice a day.

The thing is that you're not supposed to take the HFPA or the Golden Globes seriously. It started out as a charity fund-raising dinner and the agenda had nothing to do with predicting the Oscars or awarding quality.

The agenda was to get together with your friends and co-workers, get shit-faced drunk, hand out prizes as an excuse to rag on each other, and wake up in the morning with a cocktail waitress and no memory of what happened and why there's a live chicken in your living room, and a trophy with Don Ameche's name engraved on it stuck in your chandelier next to the waitress' panties.

That's why they usually stuck to just releasing the results the next morning. Partly for the public to see who won and partly to remind the participants that they were there.

However, the big media conglomerates want to have glamorous gals in glittery gowns on their magazine covers and something to fill four hours of usually dull winter TV-prime time on Sunday night, so they started hyping it up. They conveniently forgot about the whole Pia Zadora incident, and just kept pushing the glamor and the glitz in the hope of making a quick buck. What was once just a fun social get-together became a stress filled media monstrosity that holds way more sway over an actor's career than it should, because despite it's image as a qualifying play-off to the Oscars, it's ultimately meaningless.

It's a triviality, treat it as such.

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