Kurt Andersen ~ The New Yorker ~ Tibor Kalman

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE - February 2, 1998

Golden Globalization

The once cheesy awards show goes legit, sort of

by Kurt andersen

A VERY FEW YEARS AGO, the Golden Globes were a B-list joke, annual movie and TV trophies handed out by a corruptible and inconsequential group called the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, or H.F.P.A.,which consisted of a few dozen geezery, mostly third-rate show business reporters. For four decades, the New York Times ignored the event. Pia Zadora's New Star of the Year award, in 1982, won after her husband flew the members of the H.F.P.A. to Las Vegas for a party, was paradigmatic. The Golden Globes in the seventies and eighties were the institutional equivalent of Sonny Bono, a tacky but harmless show-business goof.

Now, of course, it's all different. Just as Sonny Bono was suddenly transformed into a respected Republican leader, the Golden Globes are now taken seriously by the studios, by networks, by the most important filmmakers, by the biggest stars, by the quality press. To hear this year's winners backstage on a recent Sunday night in Beverly Hills, you might have thought Nobels were being handed out. "This is the most amazing thing that's ever happened to me," said Matt Damon, the star and a co-writer of "Good Will Hunting." And Chris Carter, the creator of "The X-Files," said that his Golden Globe "is as high an honor as there is."

What de-stigmatized the awards? What changed? Nothing. The H.F.P.A. is still the same charmingly preposterous group of freeloaders and quasi-journalists. The emperor remains stark naked, but the establishment has chosen to stop noticing.

Over the last decade or two, Academy Award campaigns have become, like all forms of marketing, much more rationalized. Studios started spending serious money on Oscar-driven advertising, Fed-Exing videos of movies to Academy members, even lobbying voters by telephone. At the same time, it was noticed that the recipients of Golden Globes usually won the corresponding Oscars.

That correlation may be simply a rough form of polling data: since the eighty-two voting H.F.P.A. members tend to he demographically similar to the five thousand Academy voters -- slightly upper middlebrow Southern Californians of a certain age -- it stands to reason that they like the same movies and performances. Yet because the Golden Globes are awarded before the Academy Award nominations, which won't be announced until February 10th, causality is at least possible: if an Academy voter watches Jack Nicholson entertainingly accept a Golden Globe for "As Good As It Gets," that voter may be more inclined to vote for Nicholson for an Oscar. Such is the self-fulfilling momentum of buzz. The awards season has thus evolved in tandem with the Presidential-primary process: if the Oscars, in their effect on national moviegoing behavior, are analogous to the New Hampshire primary, then the Golden Globes are the Iowa caucuses, held a few weeks earlier -- an odd, inconsequential backwater ritual that acquired importance because, several elections ago, the national media and the candidates decided to imbue it with importance.

In the last few years, as movie stars noticed that more fuss was being made over the Golden Globes, they began showing up for the ceremony Actors, in particular, thrive on flattery, even when the flattery comes from people of no standing. As Nicholson said last week after receiving his award, "It's great when people like you." And, because them are separate awards for drama and comedy, there are twice as many chances to win. This year, Steven Spielberg, Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, and Julia Roberts were all present. No one is too A-list or too serious-minded to come. As the director Jim Sheridan ("The Boxer") walked up the red carpet, a handler pitched him to "Entertainment Tonight." "It's Jim Sheridan --he's wearing Valentino," the publicist whispered. "E.T." passed.

As more big stars show up, more journalists do, too, and that only serves to attract more stars. The rise of the Golden Globes has occurred, not coincidentally, in parallel with the infotainment explosion -- "E.T," E!, and all the rest. For a long time, the event was broadcast only on cable, befitting its second-string status, but two years ago NBC bought the rights. Indeed, with no viewer unfriendly technical awards, and with a higher concentration of famous people, the Globes make for better pure TV candy than the Academy Awards.

Jack Nicholson talked backstage about Ving Rhasnes's unscripted insistence that Jack Lemmon take his trophy, and Christine Lahti's being A.W.O.L. in the bathroom when her best-actress award was announced. "This is kinda old fashioned people giving their awards away, going to the can," he said fondly. "I expect drunks next, like there used to be." Indeed, a certain hep stratum of Hollywood enjoys the very retro roué looseness of the Golden Globes, including the whiff of petty corruption.

In a place that exists to celebrate the magnificently bogus-stunt-car explosions and digital perodactyls, firm, firm breasts and stucco chateaux-the Golden Globes are a vestige of ur-Hollywood. In the old days, the Oscars themselves were subject to capricious string-pulling, and were handed out at a boozy private hotel banquet for a few hundred insiders; then the Awards cleaned themselves up, and soon people were able to talk about "the Academy" with a straight face. The Golden Globes seem to be on the same evolutionary arc. Recently, in the Washington Post second annual exposé, the H.F.P.A. president promised institutional reform. And the passing of another en is already, being mourned. "It was better when it was cheesier," John Burnham, the co-head of the William Morris Agency's movie department, told me at a Golden Globe party. "Now that it's a part of the marketing process it's not as fun."