Best Golden Globes ever? Well, that would be a bit of an overstatement, but I could get used to this brevity thing. The only way the Globes could have gotten the business over any quicker would have been to give out the awards by mass e-mail.
NBC, of course, had to add on to the proceedings nonetheless, the better to sell the commercial time, so they overlaid Billy Bush and Nancy O’Dell of Access Hollywood repeating the announcements that were being carried live on TV Guide Channel and elsewhere. Speaking from a podium on a cheap-looking set dominated by molten-gold graphics, Bush and O’Dell gave the presentation all the class and wit of the world’s longest Lotto drawing.
The format actually could have worked, and might have even been a nice change of pace, had you replaced the AccessBots with, say, Kathy Griffin and Isaac Mizrahi, or some other professional Hollywood snarkmeisters who could have wrung a little humor and insight from the awards. But watching Bush and O’Dell trade “analysis” of the winners was painful. “In the end, with Cate Blanchett, it’s a woman imitating a man,” Bush observed of Cate Blanchett’s winning performance as Bob Dylan in I’m Not There, while O’Dell was dumbfounded that Samantha Morton pulled out a drama win over Katherine Heigl, since “it was [Heigl’s] year.” Plus, she’s like so pretty!
As for the TV awards, I say: Mad Men, yay! David Duchovny, wha? And Minnie Driver was robbed, if not surprisingly. I was happiest and saddest for Jon Hamm, who got deserved recognition for playing Don Draper, but presumably had to accept in his living room. The biggest losers this year were the winners.