It's Maybe the End of the Golden Globes...and I Feel Fine

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The Golden Globes are moronic, but Hollywood’s boycott of them is the height of idiocy and hypocrisy

Hollywood is holding the Golden Globes to account, not for its blatant corruption, but because the skin tone of its members isn’t dark enough.

Shock waves were sent through Hollywood this week when the esteemed Golden Globes became the target of a virtue signaling blitzkrieg and boycott by some of the movie business’ heavy hitters.

I am kidding of course, the Golden Globes are certainly not esteemed and no one is shocked by Hollywood virtue signaling over anything anymore.

The whole absurd firestorm started with Netflix and Amazon declaring they’d no longer work with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), the parent organization of the Golden Globes. This was quickly followed by WarnerMedia joining in the boycott, Tom Cruise returning his three past awards, and then NBC declaring they wouldn’t telecast next year’s Golden Globes ceremony.

The HFPA are a notoriously corrupt and cinematically ignorant organization filled with people with only a passing and tenuous connection to the film industry. The HFPA’s awards, the Golden Globes, have long been a punchline for being so easily purchased by big studios looking to boost a movie’s profile and box office. These are the reasons why I am so glad that Hollywood is coming together to put an end to this blight on the movie business and blasphemy against the art of cinema.

I’m just kidding again, Hollywood doesn’t care about the Golden Globes being corrupt, instead, Netflix, Amazon, WarnerMedia, Tom Cruise and NBC are all piling on the Golden Globes because the HFPA, an organizationof roughly 90 individuals that is packed with “people of color” from Asia, India, the Middle East, and Central and South America, doesn’t have any members whose skin tone is dark enough to be considered “black”.

This horrifying lack of melanin caused such an uproar at this year’s ceremony that it led to one of the most unintentionally funny moments in the show’s history when HFPA members Meher Tatna and Ali Sar, an Indian woman and Turkish man respectively, sheepishly spoke about the organization’s dire need for “diversity” after being chastised by hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, two white women, one of whom, Fey, rhad episodes of her hit tv show 30 Rock pulled from streaming circulation last year because they featured scenes with blackface. Only in Hollywood!

It’s hysterically funny to me, but not the least bit surprising, that Hollywood is not concerned by the HFPA’s relentlessly corrupt practices, just that no people with dark enough skin tone are getting in on the egregious grift.

Speaking of grift, it may come as a shock to learn that NBC’s decision to not telecast the Golden Globes this year might not exactly be entirely motivated by a wholesome yearning for diversity. According to reports, NBC pays the HFPA $60 million to televise the Golden Globes, with most of that money going to production costs, but by refusing to televise the awards, NBC saves the vast majority of that money.

Considering that the Golden Globes ratings were down 63% this year and only attracted 6.9 viewers, and that ratings and viewership for awards shows across the board are plummeting, this seems much more like a savvy business decision by NBC and not one of conscience.

NBC isn’t the only one signaling its virtue for self-serving reasons, Tom Cruise’s returning of his Golden Globes, which he won over twenty and thirty years ago for Born on the Fourth of July (1990), Jerry Maguire(1997) and Magnolia(2000), is not only utterly absurd but calculated and contrived.

Much like when Cruise was “caught on audio” chewing out crew members for violating covid protocols on the set of the newest Mission Impossible monstrosity, a scenario which struck me as being completely staged for publicity purposes, Cruise’s Golden Globes flex is a public-relations maneuver meant to generate talking points and good will when he is out shilling for his big movies this year, Top Gun: Maverick and Mission Impossible 7.

I assume Cruise is thinking that if he can distract people with his race-based virtue signaling people won’t notice how oddly contorted his face is becoming from plastic surgery. Not a bad plan.

I’m also assuming that Amazon is hoping that by signaling its phony virtue regarding race and the Golden Globes it can distract people from its horrendous treatment of its employees.

As for me, the Golden Globes have never been more than a Rickey Gervais delivery system, and an opportunity to watch rich, famous movie stars get drunk in public.

Gervais has hosted the show five times, each more glorious than the last. His final hosting gig was in 2020, before all of the covid unpleasantness, and it was a glorious thing to behold as he eviscerated the vacuous celebrities and their vapid awards with surgical precision and unabashed brutality.

I won’t miss the Golden Globes this year, and if they vanish forever, a distinct possibility, I could not care less. But with that said, I do wish that in their stead NBC gets Ricky Gervais in front of a room filled with movie stars and Hollywood big wigs and televises him comedically disemboweling them for their pretentious, self-serving nonsense. He could start with their ridiculous virtue signaling boycott of the Golden Globes over something so insignificant as skin tone.  

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Asinine and the Absurd 78th Annual Golden Globes Awards

Hollywood once again proved itself to be the moral authority of our time when a bevy of stars took to the stage Sunday night at the 78th annual Golden Globes Awards to rail against President Joe Biden’s unconstitutional, murderous air strikes in Syria, his caging of illegal immigrant kids, and his failure to fight for a $15 minimum wage, Medicare-for-All and a $2,000 stimulus check during this calamitous coronavirus lockdown.

Just kidding.

With the bad orange man gone from the White House it was back to Hollywood business as usual at the painfully lackluster, socially-distanced Golden Globes where there was a lot of performative virtue signaling regarding diversity but no actual political courage on display.

The Golden Globes have long been a running joke as the Hollywood Foreign Press (HFPA), a collection of 89 “foreign entertainment journalists” who vote on the awards, notoriously care less about artistic quality than lining their pockets, corporate swag and basking in star power.

The L.A. Times recently did a searing investigation of the organization and, shock of shocks, found them to be corrupt…I think Captain Obvious was the reporter who broke the story. 

Hollywood’s big takeaway from the L.A. Times story though was that the HFPA is racist because it has no black members.

This was highlighted throughout last night’s show as flaccid comedy duo Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, as well as numerous presenters, made snide comments about the racial “scandal”. This led to one of the more riotously funny moments when an Indian woman and Turkish man who are members of the HFPA had to grovel on live tv about how bad they were for not having black people in their group. Diversity!

Ironically, after all the bemoaning of HFPA racism the three of the first four awards given out went to black actors, Daniel Kaluuya for Judas and the Black Messiah and John Boyega for Small Axe, and to the first black led Pixar film Soul.

Later in the night the Best Actor and Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama awards also went to black artists, the late Chadwick Boseman for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Andra Day for The United States vs. Billie Holiday.

Stupid Golden Globes can’t even stay on brand when it comes to their own racism.

One of the few bright spots in previous Golden Globes has been comedian Ricky Gervais serving as ornery host. Gervais’ scathing opening monologues at the Globes are some of the best comedy of recent years. Never one to pander or genuflect to his star-studded and empty-headed live audience, Gervais instead consistently eviscerated the cavalcade of self-satisfied and self-righteous stars luxuriously partying before him.

Unfortunately, this year Gervais wasn’t hosting so instead of his uncomfortably honest and gloriously cutting comedy we were stuck with the insipid nice girl comedy of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.

Another redeeming quality of the past Golden Globes awards has been watching celebrities get drunk at the dinner party style affair. Sadly, this year’s show was “socially distanced” so random shots of sloppy drunk celebs were replaced with awkward moments on zoom. .

Sans Gervais and drunk celebs the Golden Globes were reduced to being nothing but a handing out of awards no one, even the people winning them actually care about.

Besides the endless babbling about diversity and inclusion, the political talk was pretty minimal. Sure, Borat made some stale Trump and Giuliani jokes, and Mark Ruffalo bemoaned the “hideous dark storm” of Trump “we’ve been living through” and Aaron Sorkin mentioned democracy being under siege, but that was about it.

What is so striking is there were ample opportunities for Hollywood heavyweights to speak up about current issues, but they refused.

Sean Penn, one of my favorite actors and activists, was there, and besides looking like Moe from the Three Stooges, he didn’t do much of anything except display a shocking lack of testicular fortitude. He could’ve spoken up about Biden’s illegal attack on Syria, like he had done about the Iraq War…but he didn’t.

Jodie Foster won best Supporting Actress for her work in the film The Mauritanian, a movie about the injustice of a prisoner held in Guantanamo Bay for fourteen years without charge. But Foster never mentioned Guantanamo Bay, injustice or the immorality of the War on Terror in her acceptance speech.

Famed anti-war activist Jane Fonda, who once went to North Vietnam while the U.S. was at war with them, was awarded a lifetime achievement award but never mentioned Biden’s illegal airstrikes in Syria, or his support of murderous tyrant Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, or the continuation of the “kids in cages” immigration policy. She instead just regurgitated the usual woke pablum of diversity and inclusion.

Chloe Zhao won best director and best drama for her film Nomadland, which examines those crushed under the boot of American capitalism. Yet she never once mentioned Biden’s failure to push for the $15 minimum wage, Medicare-for-All or a coronavirus stimulus check which he promised, three things which would immeasurably help the suffering people featured in her film.

With Trump gone and the corpse of Joe Biden being the one obliterating Syrians and caging kids at the border, Hollywood elites are now all too happy to lose their stridently socially conscious rhetoric in favor of status quo cheerleading and social justice ass-kissing.

In 2017 in the wake of Donald Trump’s election Meryl Streep “bravely” spoke out in defense of immigrants at the Globes, which was curious since she had been completely silent during the previous 8 years when Obama set deportation records and put “kids in cages”.

It seems Hollywood is following in Queen Meryl’s faux-noble footsteps by deciding to stay quiet now when speaking up would take courage.

Everyone knows Hollywood is not exactly filled with the bravest souls that are driven purely by integrity and their commitment to principle. But the amount of self-righteousness mixed with craven cowardice on display at the Golden Globes last night was remarkable even by Hollywood’s depraved standards.

In conclusion, if the Golden Globes are any indication, awards season is going to be filled with the most venal, vacuous and vapid posing and preening imaginable, but it won’t feature any principled protests against Biden administration policies, no matter how abhorrent they may be.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota Podcast: Episode 28 - Soul

This week on everybody's favorite cinema podcast, Barry and I dive into Pixar's latest animated venture Soul. This unique film stars Jamie Foxx and Tina Fey as two entities trying to navigate life, death and New York City. Topics discussed on this episode include diversity in animation, my allergy to Pixar movies and Barry's tales of bad investment advice.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 28: Soul

Thanks for listening!

©2021

Pixar's Soul: A Review and Commentary

Pixar’s first “black-led” movie ‘Soul’ isn’t about being black, it’s about being human

Pixar went to great lengths to make sure Soul would be acceptable to black people, but that won’t stop the woke from conjuring racial criticism of it.

Soul, the new film from esteemed animation studio Pixar that premiered on the streaming service Disney + on Christmas Day, has gotten a lot of attention for featuring the first black protagonist in Pixar’s history.

The film tells the story of Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), a good-hearted jazz musician (who happens to be black) making a living teaching music at a New York City middle school.

On the day Joe’s life is about to change following an audition with a famous saxophonist searching for a piano player, things end up taking an unanticipated twist.

What follows is a very existential and mildly entertaining metaphysical magical mystery tour through life, death, art and New York City. 

In this era of aggressive wokeness and cancel culture, Pixar and Disney went to great lengths to make sure Soul was not deemed racist and was acceptable to black people.

According to the New York Times, “Knowing their work would be minutely scrutinized, the director Pete Doctor, the co-screenwriter Mike Jones and the producer Dana Murray, who are white, set out to create a character who would be believably Black while avoiding the stereotypes of the past.”

So the question is how could these artists, who are members of a race (white) so despicable the New York Times refuses to capitalize it, believably create a character whose race (Black) is so superior that it is always capitalized in the New York Times?

As the Times informs us, the first step in this Herculean task was Pixar’s vice president for inclusion strategies Britta Wilson building a “Cultural Trust” made up of the company’s black employees.

The second step was that the production “talked to a lot of external consultants and black organizations...”

And finally the production brought in black writer Kemp Powers as a screenwriter who then got promoted to co-director, the first black director in Pixar history.

If all of that corporate pandering, from having a vice president of “inclusion strategies” to a “Cultural Trust” to hiring racial consultants, seems transparently ridiculous, repulsively shameless and downright griftery, you are not alone. But thankfully the film somewhat succeeds despite, as opposed to because of, all of this human resources inspired nonsense.

Ironically, the end result of all of Pixar’s gratuitous genuflecting to black people is a film that is strikingly color blind in a gloriously unwoke, old-fashioned and beautifully rational Martin Luther King-esque kind of way, as Joe’s race is actually entirely incidental to the story in Soul.

To the film’s great credit it doesn’t tell a black story, it tells a human story. Soul transcends race, or any of our other superficial differences like ethnicity and gender, and highlights the fact that we are not “white” people and “black” people, but rather, just people…all of us filled with hopes, fears, dreams and heartbreaks.

The funny thing though about Pixar being so scared of being called “racist” that it bent over backwards to make Soul acceptable to black people, is that it wasn’t black people it needed to be worried about…it was the woke.

Case in point, Kirsten Acuna, a non-black, woke film critic for the Insider, was deeply disturbed by Soul’s racial politics, so much so that the rather harmless film left her “cringing up until the very last minute”.

Acuna’s specific woke complaints contain too many spoilers to share in detail, but one of her non-spoiler issues was that “Pixar’s first Black-led film should celebrate a Black man’s experience and solely focus on his dreams and desires. Instead, Joe’s life takes a backseat in order for a white woman to figure out what she wanted from life.”

Contrary to Acuna’s complaint, there is actually no “white woman” character in the movie at all. Even though the alleged offending character, “22”, is voiced by white actress Tina Fey, a major premise of the movie is that “22” is a spiritual entity capable of taking any form.

Acuna was also dismayed that Soul has a 97% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes, declaring that the majority of critics who have reviewed the movie are white, and “shouldn't at least half of the reviews for Pixar's first film with a Black lead come from critics of color?”

So if we studiously apply Ms. Acuna’s race-based test for film critics, then the obvious question becomes…why didn’t Ms. Acuna let a black critic write a review of Pixar’s first black-led film instead of writing one herself?

This is why wokeness is so insidious and why trying to appease it is a Sisyphean venture, because it is an inherently irrational, emotionally fueled exercise in grievance seeking and virtue signaling…case in point – the vacuous and vapid woke fools like Kirsten Acuna lamenting Soul’s allegedly troublesome racial politics.

As for my opinion, Soul wasn’t as great as I hoped it would be, but it also wasn’t bad. It’s an at times entertaining, thought provoking, visually gorgeous and interesting movie.

My biggest issue with Soul was that it wasn’t quite as philosophically profound as it could have been, but to my surprise and to its credit, it also wasn’t heavy-handed and politically preachy…and for that I was very grateful, and you should be too.

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A mildly entertaining movie that takes a unique look at life, death and art. Not perfect by any stretch but compelling enough to keep you engaged.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020