' ' Cinema Romantico: Who Was the Golden Globes-iest Golden Globes Nominee?

Monday, December 10, 2018

Who Was the Golden Globes-iest Golden Globes Nominee?


Nominations for the 76th Golden Globes were announced last Thursday. If they were, as pundits noted, diverse, one year after Natalie Portman memorably, righteously threw a stink bomb right in the middle of an awards announcement when she called out the complete lack of women in the Best Director category, well, hey, look! There are no women nominated for Best Director! And this in a year when the Best Director of 2018 was Lucrecia Martel for “Zama” (not that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has seen it). What’s more, nearly thirty years after “Driving Miss Daisy” won Best Picture at the Academy Awards while “Do the Right Thing” was snubbed from being nominated at all, we have a Best Director showdown between Spike Lee for “BlacKkKlansman” and Peter Farrelly for “Green Book”, or “Driving Miss Daisy 2.” The arc of justice bends...how does that go again?

But reading the tea leaves of Hollywood’s Office Christmas Party is difficult and sometimes dangerous. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association speaks for itself, no one else, even if they often seem to operate from some place of doing in advance what they think the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is going to do so as to appear part of the big kid’s club. No, the HFPA is mostly interested in mingling with stars. And that is why, once again, as we do every year, Cinema Romantico is here not to contextualize this set of nominees in any meaningful way but merely to examine them and then determine which person the HFPA most likely nominated to simply to schmooze. I am here, in other words, to determine which of The Golden Globes nominees is the Golden Globes-iest.


Cinema Romantico’s own Golden Globes-iest Golden Globes Nominee is a tie between Eventual Oscar Winner™ Lady Gaga and Nicole Kidman, her eminence, for Best Actress. This is the award show equivalent of Jupiter aligning with Mars. Cinema Romantico strongly suspects the only reason Keira Knightley was not nominated for “Colette” in the same category was to prevent this blog’s head from exploding. But this is not, from the HFPA perspective, the Golden Globes-iest set of Golden Globes nominees. That is because, as intimated, Lady Gaga is going to win the Oscar (we have this on authority from the cosmos) and the last time Nicole Kidman gave a bad performance was – [checking notes] – oh, right, never. The HFPA surely wants both Gaga and Kidman at the party, but they also didn’t have to bend their rules to make it happen.

On first glance, Christian Bale’s Best Actor nomination for playing Dick Cheney in “Vice” might appear like the very bending of rules to which we just referred since his nod comes in the Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. But, while I’d like to think that’s just a drag on Cheney himself, it was probably a way to maneuver more room for nominations for Rami Malek and Lucas Hedges, which is the predominant purpose of having Both Dramatic and Musical or Comedy categories – that is, more invitations to go around. And anyway, I struggle to believe the HFPA wants to mingle with Bale. He strikes me as, shall we say, anti-mingle.

Robert Redford for “The Old Man and the Gun” feels a little Globes-y because he, too, is in the Musical or Comedy category, does not come across necessarily like an Oscar front-runner and his star power makes him a definite Would-Want-To-Mingle-With person. But, his presence also seems designed to elicit an appearance onstage along with Bob Woodward in the face of, well, everything, which, right or wrong, is antithetical to cocktail party ethos. No, there is another.

I have not seen “Dumplin’”. I might not see “Dumplin’”. It is the end of the year and I am busy, in life and at the movies and there are other movies I need/want to see first. And so I do not mean to cast aspersions against “Dumplin’”. But whatever the reason for Dolly Parton’s Best Song nomination for her “Girl in the Movies” for “Dumplin’”, it adheres to Southern Living® Magazine’s #1 rule for hosting a party. Rule #1 is: if Dolly is available, invite her. The HFPA did. She is Golden Globes-iest.


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