Oscar & Emmy Watch: Musings & Misgivings: Golden Globes Debacle
Well, we know this much at least—if last night’s Golden Globes telecast was a train wreck, Ricky Gervais was the engineer.
There’s bawdy and then there’s bad. Not that overlong, self-inflated telecasts like the Golden Globe Awards can’t occasionally use a dash or two of bad taste, nastiness and even outright offensiveness (as opposed to the sometimes blinding garishness of, say, the Oscar ceremonies). But, c’mon now, stale, almost uniformly unfunny, way-past-their-expiration-date and at times cringingly unkind jokes about Charlie Sheen, “gay Scientologists,” the “airbrushed” cast of Sex and the City (“girls, we know how old you are. I saw one of you in an episode of Bonanza), Hugh Hefner as “the walking dead,” and even Robert Downey Jr.’s past legal and drug troubles are supposed to pass for entertainment? “Hugely mean-spirited” is how Downey described the proceedings at one point, and he had a point.
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association deserves what it gets, and if Gervais wants to kid about corruption and bribes being the only explanation for the nominations for The Tourist, who’s to say he’s wrong? That’s called an easy target, and Gervais clearly had no intention of playing it safe, which is entirely fine. Shows like this need unscripted, on-the-edge spontaneity and unpredictability. The problem wasn’t the talented Gervais; it was his tone-deaf material. And why exactly he seemed to disappear for about an hour midway during the show (prompting Twitter jibes that he may have been either a) drunk or b) fired mid-broadcast) is a question that no one seems able to answer. “I want to do either such a bad job I’m not invited back,” Gervais earlier told the Chicago Sun-Times, “or such a good job that I don’t want to do it again.” Choose choice one.
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