Golden Globes: A Formal Assessment

“I want to start by saying this whole angled camera thing is very weird,” Seth Rogen said at this Sunday’s Golden Globes when appearing midway through the telecast with Catherine O’Hara to present Best Female Actor - Limited/Anthology Series/TV Movie, gratefully giving voice to what everyone was thinking, certainly what My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I were thinking watching along at home about the bizarre close-ups in which all the presenters were too close to the camera while also stranded in something approximating the middle of the room with many of the attendees glimpsed in the background. “It’s inelegant, it’s strange, this whole half of the room can see my bald spot.” Charlie Chaplin, who knew a thing or two about a moving camera, observed that life is a tragedy in close-up and a comedy in a long shot and hey, here were the dumb ol’ Globes living it and having no idea they were living it. Simply amazing. 

On the other hand, they did sort of create some comedy in long shot, albeit unintentionally, as the weird camera angles allowed us to occasionally get glimpses of Ralph Fiennes at the “Conclave” table in the background suffering through these interminable and awkward attempts at humor in front of him, an actor in real time trying to decide between continuing to engage with full award campaign mode and shine it on or just crack and start crying. “I can’t take it anymore!” I imagined him screaming, going full Shakespeare. “It’s not worth it!” That was compelling, at least, and all for naught since Fiennes didn’t win Best Dramatic Actor anyway, losing out to Adrien Brody for “The Brutalist,” which maybe makes Brody the Oscar front-runner, or maybe not, who on earth knows, because the Globes are often not a bellwether. I mean, “Wicked” won for something called Cinematic and Box Office Achievement and I don’t even know what that means. That it made more money than the other nominees? It sounds like one of those movie awards that Alvy Singer jokes about in “Annie Hall.” (“It’s about damn time,” Vin Diesel said as he introduced the award, I guess forgetting that more than a few box office blockbusters have won the Golden Globe for Best Dramatic Picture along the way.) I don’t even want to research it. Where was I?

See Stanley Tucci toss back a glass of fizz in real time. This is what the people want.

The camera angles. I was going to say, this was just proof that enshittification has come for awards shows too, which can’t just stick to the camera angles that have worked for eons, how every ostensible improvement in our lives is the exact opposite, but nobody wants to hear that, least of all My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, who hears this every day and is probably rolling her eyes right now. And anyway, I must call myself out; it’s not true! CBS made one discernible improvement to their Globes telecast! As if hearkening back to their coverage of the NCAA basketball tournament of yore, when they would throw it to commercials or come back from commercials by deploying a quad box so that we could see games taking place in all four regions, CBS used a quad box for the Globes each time they went to commercial so we could see interactions between celebrities in four different places rather than one, a la the poor image above taken of my television set. As I’ve repeated ad nauseum, this is what we want from Hollywood’s Holiday Office Party – celebrities! Altcasts are all the rage these days, especially for sports, showing big games through all manner of different perspectives, and for next year’s Globes, CBS needs to get into the alt-cast business by running a concurrent broadcast on another channel, or online, where cameras are trained on individual tables and we can watch the entire show by watching, say, the “Only Murders in the Building” table. Imagine watching Martin Short watch the Golden Globes. It’s the awards show final frontier. 

(All Golden Globes winners are listed anywhere else on the internet.)