Flickgrrl

Carrie, I have to ask: Why are the Golden Globes any more silly than any other movie-awards giveaway, including the Oscars? This whole current period of needy filmmakers being willingly indulged, ad infinitum, by fawning "fans" (be they journalists or the industry types themselves, colleagues of the needy) borders on the comic/pathetic. At least the Globes don't have the pretentions of the Oscars. It's a party, that's all, where everyone gets drunk and the few lucky ones take home the door prize. I've often wondered why we hold the Globes in such contempt. (I've a hunch some kind of -ism is involved here.) Are the foreign "journalist" who comprise it any more sleazy that our American junketeers or those "critics" who we never heard of but who appear regularly in the print ads? It seems that far too many movie journalist are all to eager to accomodate the studios' marketing departments. So, I guess - yikes! - I'm a Golden Globes lover. It's an award as disposable as just about everything else in American culture and the show itself isn't nearly as elephantine, long-winded or self-important as the Oscars which, by the way, have also become disposable. I mean, does anyone even remember that Emma Thompson and Francis McDormand once won Oscars? Or what about Jim Broadbent? Who he? Sure, the public may remember Julia and "Erin Brochovich" but few other Oscar winners are memorable. Might be a column in that, Carrie.

Love your contrarian stance, Joe. To me, an award voted on by 5,000 industry professionals (the Oscars) means more than one voted on by 90 journalists who have been wined and dined by studio marketing departments. As the v.p. of publicity for Warners once put it, "The Golden Globes members are people who would cross the Alps for a hot dog."

I looked at the HFPA Web site and saw the list of current members. What, from your perspective, calibrates the quality of the membership? Is it critical acclaim in their homelands from credible colleagues? Shmoozability? Location, location, location? Isn't everyone a critic these days? Isn't George Schlatter really running Hollywood? Maybe if I add a little panache by saying, "Well, the 'Le Monde' and 'Financial Times' critics say this film is pretty good," I'd get a little more respect around my household instead of outright dismissal.

That's a great line, Carrie! Almost as good as Sylvia Sidney's that you quoted. (Those old pros really had a way with a line.) As for my favorite Globe moment, it's the recurring sight of Jack Nicholson, wearing sunglasses and sitting like a potentate in the front row, year after year. That's what I'll miss this year.

Won't miss it. For me, a matter of indifferent tedium. Thrilled, though, that SAG boycotted.

I agree with Joe that the Oscars have lost some of their luster and allure in recent years. I think the presence of all these other movie awards shows has watered down its importance and popularity - although it still remains the most important and prestigeous of the group. I remember a time - I'm 50 - when the winners meant something. They stayed with you. And their careers exploded. Now, someone wins an Oscar and their stock goes up for one, maybe two years and then ... nothing. Look at Cuba Gooding, Jr. Based on the stuff he makes, it's hard to believe he's an actual Oscar winner. The only winners who seem to remain in the public's conscience are those who are real "movie stars," like Roberts and Theron. The others all seem to fade into the woodwork. It didn't used to be that way. The Globes? They're just another form of Hollywood hype and publicity. Those winners are even more unmemorable than today's Oscar victors.

Carrie -- One more thing. Re those "5,000 industry professionals" who vote on the Oscars, I'm willing to wager that you, as a working professional film critic, see more films per year than any one of those voters. You probably watch between 250-300 a year, right? How many films do you think Spielberg or Scorsese (or any of this year's potential nominees) gets to watch when one of them is knee-deep in making a film? Probably very few. My point? Critics get to see everything - or close to everything. And so, critics awards (and I'm not including the Hollywood Foreign Press here) carry more weight - for me at least - than the Oscars. That's because people like Carrie Rickey actually see movies, a lot of them, and look at them closely and analytically. Plus, the top critics working today have years of experience behind them. It all adds up. The only movie awards of any merit are those doled out by critics. That may be an excessive statement but I honestly believe it.

A meaty discussion. The Oscars still carry clout with me, and no matter how boring the telecast I'm riveted from start to finish. Maybe it's the nostalgia talking. What worries me is the glut of awards, period. Didn't Julia Roberts just get a lifetime achievement from one group -- my memory fails me as to which? What is she, 40? What's next ... Paris Hilton, this is your life!

I thought Frances McDormand was splendid in "Fargo," Cuba Gooding terrific in "Jerry Maguire" and Emma Thompson great in "Howards End" for which they won Oscars. Can't say the same about Pia Zadora in "Butterfly" or Al Pacino in "Scent of a Woman," which won them Golden Globes. And it was the Pacino Golden Globe win for that hoo-hah that reminded Academy members that he'd never been Oscared.

Pia Zadora? Low blow, Carrie! But, seriously, I didn't mean to imply that McDormand, Thompson or Gooding didn't deserve their Oscars. Far from it. McDormand, in particular, should have won a few more by now. ("Laurel Canyon," anyone?) No, it's just that it seems once they've been awarded, no one remembers - save for a few critics or buffs. BTW, Pacino's win for "Scent of a Woman" has always struck me as one of the greater movie-award travesties. In my opinion.

I can't recall the name of the very wise Hollywood star who said that if Best Actor awards were to mean anything, each actor would have to perform the same role.

I like the Golden Globes more than the Oscars for two reasons.

First, the Globes have a Comedy/Musical category, so those movies and performances get recognized; by comparison, comedy always, always, always gets the shaft at the Oscars. (Off the top of my head, I think Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, and Diane Keaton are the only leading actors to win Oscars for comedies in the whole history of the award. That's - well, "ridiculous" is a polite word for what it is.)

Second, the Globes tend to award somewhat more daring work. The best recent example I can think of is the year Burt Reynolds won Best Supporting Actor for "Boogie Nights" at the Globes, while Robin Williams won for "Good Will Hunting" at the Oscars. But there are lots of other comparable examples.

This second point suggests the biggest problem with the Oscars: they persist in awarding the dull, stuffy, eat-your-spinach kind of work that Louis B. Mayer - or, for that matter, Joe Breen - would have thought was terrific. That, to me, is the least interesting style of American moviemaking, yet it's the Oscars' reason for being.

As I was writing this, another, very simple problem with the Oscars occurred to me: I miss Johnny Carson.

Mark: The Hollywood Foreign Press scribes write for publications less well known than Le Monde.

Bob: Well said -- though I can't remember who originally said it...does anybody else?

Wwolfe: I miss Carson, too, though Steve Martin was nearly as great the yearhe hosted the Oscars. Methinks Burt Reynolds won the Globe is because the GGs really really like him, not because they admired his performance.

Joe: Another reasin the Oscars mean more is that professionals note qualities others do not. I once asked Meryl Streep what her criteria was on voting for Oscars. "Degree of difficulty," she crisply replied, citing why that year she voted for Fernanda Montenegro in "Central Station." The people who do it know when a performance is a triple-salchow or just your average twirl.

In terms of the ancillary economic effects (the various caterers, limo rentals, tux rentals, etc.) when a "big" event is cancelled, there's a lot of collateral damage. And the economy of L.A. is precarious enough as it is: if this continues, a lot of businesses in L.A. (which don't seem to be directly attached to the studios, but actually feed off of the movies and TV) will simply fold.

But that's irrelevant to the fact that this entertainment "award" fever has gotten ridiculous, and deserves to die an ignoble death.

People seem to forget that one of the reasons for the formation of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences was as a union-busting agency for the studios. In the late 1920s, there were a lot of changes happening in Hollywood, including the introduction of sound, and the studios were afraid of the introduction of a lot of uncontrollable elements. Stage-trained actors had begun to "agitate" for better working conditions (and there was the formation of Actors Equity), and the studios were afraid that many of these actors would bring these ideas to the movies. And, indeed, many of them did: in the early 1930s, among the people who started the formation of what would become the Screen Actors Guild would include Melvyn Douglas, James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. Early on, if you were a member of the Screen Actors Guild, you were ineligible for nomination for an Academy Award. Were awards so important that people would forego joining a professional union in order to compete? The studios were betting on it, and if someone liek Frank Capra is to be believed (from his autobiography) even in 1932 (only 5 years after the creation of the Academy Awards), he was so desperate for an "Oscar" that he would have done anything for the "honor".

So people who wonder why these awards were started should remember: it was started as a way to get people NOT to join the unions.

But soon, enough of the people who would become stars were in the union, and so the Motion Picture Academy had to relent. (By 1933, the classic example was Katharine Hepburn; this "society girl" wasn't desperate to make money, so she could walk away whenever she wanted, and you couldn't blackball her, because she was so arrogant she didn't care. If she wanted to support SAG, she would support SAG, and there wasn't a thing anyone could do about it, and she turned out to be RKO's biggest star that year, with MORNING GLORY and LITTLE WOMEN being top grossers - LITTLE WOMEN was, in fact, RKO's biggest success of 1933, outgrossing KING KONG. So what could the industry do? They gave her an Academy Award.)

But the (valid) critics awards were created to counter the prevailing industry. In 1934, there was a (critical) outcry because Bette Davis wasn't even considered for an Oscar for OF HUMAN BONDAGE. In NYC, the critics were outraged that a supposedly "serious" organization wouldn't even consider Davis, proving how industry-oriented the awards were, and NOT based on merit. (Davis was a Warner Brothers star on loan to RKO for OF HUMAN BONDAGE, and neither the executives of Warners not the executives of RKO put her name froward; in those days, there were no official "nominees", simply studio recommendations.) By contrast, Harry Cohn was glad to put forward Claudette Colbert (and this was seconded by the Paramount executives, for whom she was under contract) because IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT was the biggest hit of the year for Columbia.

And for years, the NY Film Critics Circle really did take risks: they gave Agnes Moorhead the Best Actress award for THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS at a time when Hollywood tried to bury that movie (though Moorhead was nominated as Best Supporting Actress), in the mid-1940s, they started giving awards to British actresses (two in a row: Celia Johnson for BRIEF ENCOUNTER and Deborah Kerr for BLACK NARCISSUS and THE ADVENTURESS), they often gave awards to people who were overlooked by the Academy (and who would not even be nominated): Ida Lupino for THE HARD WAY and Tallulah Bankhead for LIFEBOAT are two examples.

But in its first years, the NY Film Critics Circle made no pretense that they had any connection to the industry: what the Motion Picture Academy did was irrelevant.

But by the 1950s, the NY Film Critics Circle started to overlap with the Oscars, and by the 1960s, this was a situation that many critics felt was intolerable. Something truly exciting was happening in the movies, adventurous and challenging works were coming from Antonioni, Godard, Resnais, Ingmar Bergman, and most of these were not being acknowledged by the Academy. In 1965, there was the most notorious example: the Best Foreign Film nominations were handled as they are now (and always have been), in that the countries send a nominee, which is then judged by a committee and the committee choses the top five as nominees. Well: France sent Godard's PIERROT LE FOU and Denmark sent Dreyer's GERTRUD, and the philistines in Hollywood had FITS at the screenings, with catcalls and throwing things at the screen... the screenings were stopped after about 15 minutes!

This was one of the great scandals in Oscar history. But this was seen as a sign that Hollywood just wasn't with it, and so, in NYC, a group of critics, writing for magazines and weeklies and not daily newspapers, decided that something had to be done, just to make a statement that some people in this country recognized what was happening in the movies around the world, that there were some people who weren't blinkered, parochial philistines. (What was so funny was that this resolve was so strong that people who disliked and/or loathed each other banded together, because they believed so much in the art of film, and the feeling that the NY Film Critics Circle had become almost an apologia for the industry, and that the Oscars were hopeless, proved enough to unite people as disparate as John Simon, Stanley Kauffmann, Arthur Knight, Joseph Morgenstern, Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Wilfred Sheed, Harold Clurman.) Thus was born the National Society of Film Critics.

So when people act as if the NY Film Critics Circle or the National Society of Film Critics should provide a preview as to the Academy Awards, i'm always amazed: what are people, stupid? Don't they know the history of these organizations? Don't they know that the NY Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics were explicitly created to counter the union-busting Motion Picture Academy?

Don Cheadle was just quoted as saying that maybe if this award season really dies, it will help people focus on the issues, which relate to the idea that if you actually do the work, you should be compensated, i.e., ASCAP and BMI make sure that, if you write a song, whenever it's played on the radio or on TV or in the movies, you have to get paid. And the WGA is saying that if movies stream over the internet, if someone is making a profit on it, they should be compensated since it's their work. Is that so hard to understand? Why are the studios acting as if wanting some sort of royalties is being greedy? But the studios now are not the same, they're not run by a group of feisty individuals, they're impersonal cogs in multinational wheels, and the studios are hoping that the strike fades through attrition, e.g., the separate deals that United Artist and the Weinstein Company have made with the WGA. Multiply that, and you no longer have a union with any clout.

So, yes, there will be blood....

Daryl,

Excellent points, and thank you for providing the historical perspective about the Oscars, a trophyfest designed to counter unionization, now under siege by the Writer's Guild, which asks only for a piece of what looks to be THE prinicpal profit center for filmed entertainment in the coming decades.

P.S. Can you send a link to your wonderful blog?

Sorry for the delay is responding.

Over the weekend, the DGA made its deal with the studios, but we'll see if this leads to any movement between the studios and the WGA.

But my blog is: www.d-a-c.blogspot.com but have to admit i'm such a technological idiot that i don't know how to link or how to post pictures. But i often include the links inside my blog, when i quote from someone (such as Joe Baltake or Dave Kehr or you).

Thanks, Daryl. I'm optimistic that now the producers have agreed to give directors 7/10 of a penny on every downloaded movie, they'll strike a similar deal with the writers guild.