Swift the Great and Powerful

The only thing that you, extremely frustrated Cinema Romantico reader, want to read less than a Golden Globes take is a Golden Globes take 48 hours after the Golden Globes already sunk to the bottom of the pool at the Beverly Hilton. If you want us to refund your click, no problem, just email the technical administrator at [email address not found]. It’s just, I’m intrigued by them, the Globes, that is. Well, not so much about the awards themselves as the celebrities, which have always been the true point of the Globes, or more precisely, a celebrity.

Because if Golden Globes host Jo Koy hadn’t thrown his writers under the bus mid-foundering of his opening monologue at this past Sunday’s awards show, I would have felt sorry for him. Anymore, hosting an awards show is an exercise in flop-sweat futility. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, the modern exemplar of hosting, I would contend, and nobody’s fools, have seen the writing on the wall and now won’t go anywhere near it except in those occasional years of host-less Oscars when they briefly play faux hosts. Even in the old days, hosts were frequently doomed, but the backlash would arrive in more manageable waves. In the era of social media, it’s all at once, a firehouse of vitriol, evoked in how Koy palpably could tell in real time just how bad he was bombing. That would have been bad enough. I mean, it’s one thing for Twitter to render judgement, it’s another for Taylor Swift, who in a delicious twist went from The Golden Globes-iest to the Globes’ preeminent arbiter of taste when Koy, perhaps trying to right the ship, perhaps momentarily blacking out from in-over-his-headedness, joked about the Globes having fewer shots of Swift than an NFL game.

After being forced out of college basketball coaching, more or less, the late horse’s ass Bob Knight took an analyst job on ESPN, and once broke a cardinal rule of live tv by taking a big swig of his drink in full view of the camera to dismiss what he saw as the whole frivolous affair. And whether it was the joke’s simple lameness, or its implication that she’s thirsty for the camera, when CBS cut to Swift after Koy’s crack, Swift pointedly did not laugh, did not even smile, she just coldly took a drink of champagne, dismissing him with a sip. The host could have literally said “I’ll show myself out,” walked right out stage left and never returned and no one would have blamed him. Indeed, it was only made worse later when Jim Gaffigan presented an award and cracked a joke at which point the camera cut to Swift roaring with laughter. She was like Johnny Carson, in other words, the way he would wave a comic he liked over from the stage to the couch on the old Tonight Show, yet more biting, more demanding. She became the NFL’s foremost unofficial brand ambassador in 2023, and here she became something like a real-time pop cultural kingmaker, all ye who aim jokes her way beware. 

The tabloids reported that after “Barbie” won for Box Office Achievement, which Swift’s “Eras Tour” was also up for, she left. That’s probably why the cameras never returned to her table. She’d rendered judgement on their whole show too. Like a Gucci-clad Daniel Plainview, she was finished.