Monday, January 9, 2017

Hollywood Foreign Press Continues to Surprise

Alright, I'll be the first to own it. My predictions for this years Golden Globes were almost entirely off this year. But that is one of the reasons I often prefer watching them to the Emmys (though I'll be honest, the last couple of years the Emmys have been getting more relevant): sometimes they can serve as a precursor to next seasons awards, other times, they recognize series that get shut out because of brighter suns.
And there were definitely some promising trends over this years awards. For starters, for the first time in all the years I've been watching them, HBO was completely shut out. They've had some rough patches over the last few years, but for them to go 0 for 14 is practically unheard of, even though they had some solid series this time out.
However, we can also see that the future seems to lie in FX. Even though, The Americans was shut out and People Vs. O.J. Simpson won fewer awards than expected (more on that later) it still had the best night of any of the network, taking four awards. Two of them went to the critically acclaimed (and now on my watch list) Atlanta and the brilliant hyphenate Donald Glover, who seems so accomplished in so many fields, he makes Aziz Ansari look like an underachiever (and when does Master of None come back?).
But AMC managed to get back into the game, winning three major acting awards for the extraordinary Night Manager.  While I wanted Olivia Colman to win rather badly, I was delighted to see Hugh Laurie prevail for his magnificent performance as Richard Roper. Always delightful as a speechmaker, he had the most amusing speech of the night, saying he was glad to prevail at "the last Golden Globes" and added "the words 'Hollywood' , 'Foreign' and 'Press' are sure to be despised... Even the word 'Association' is sure to be judged with suspicion.' Tom Hiddleston's win was even more unexpected, but certainly not underserved in one of the stronger fields of Lead Actors in recent memory.
After three years of struggling to get into the major awards market, Netflix managed to take the spotlight away from Amazon by winning Best Drama and Best Actress for The Crown. I'll admit its a little weird seeing this series prevail where House of Cards, Orange is the New Black and Stranger Things have failed, but that's probably because I still have this series on my 'to watch' list. At least Game of Thrones  was shutout..
As for the other awards, I was overjoyed to see Tracee Ellis Ross prevail for black-ish. She's one of the finest comic performers on screen today and she's more than deserved her turn in the spotlight. And it really is a good to see someone prevail in the comedy lists. I was a little perplexed in seeing Billy Bob Thornton prevail for Amazon's only win in David E. Kelley's Goliath. He gave a very eloquent speech and was sui generis to all his fellow nominees, but I think he has as much chance of even being nominated by the Emmys as Gael Garcia Bernal does for Mozart in the Jungle. Still, it does demonstrate how surprising the Golden Globes can be.

Of course, the Globes was particularly more politically charged, starting with Jimmy Fallon's opening monologue, and concluding on Meryl Streep's electric speech criticizing (without mentioning by name) our President Elect in accepting her lifetime achievement award. (My take? She's Meryl frigging Streep, the greatest actress of three generations, and she has more than earned the right to say whatever the hell she wants. Besides, at this point in her career, who has she got left to thank?). But it was more entertaining then the typical awards show, and in its results, probably a lot more accurate than a lot of the other ones. Alright, SAG awards, the bar has been raised. Don't screw it up.

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