Oh wow. First of all, let me say thank you for clicking on this article. It means so much to know that you took the time out of your day to read these words. Ahhh! I can’t believe this! I’m so incredibly grateful. Thank you to the Guardian for letting me share myself and my art with the world. Thanks to my editors for always being supportive. Thanks to Ari Emanuel and everyone at WME. Thanks to my wife for letting me write in peace – I know how hard it is to be away from me for even a second. This is an incredible honour which I’d like to share with all other culture writers staying up late because of this god-forsaken program. Your pain and your struggle should be recognised.
Oh wait, is that the light? Are you playing me off? I have to start the actual piece? OK, OK, OK. One last thing: *BLEEPED*
That was fun. What was not was the 2016 Golden Globe awards, the lardy show business bore that endeavours to be both excessively laudatory and borderline transgressive all at once. In service of that noble goal, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association brought back the thumb-shaped television star Ricky Gervais to playfully insult the various celebrities and creative types in the audience. If you watched the event to completion, you saw what was perhaps Gervais’s most aggressive monologue yet, which included jabs at Caitlyn Jenner’s transition, celebrity drug addiction, and the inherent worthlessness of the Golden Globe award. This was followed by a truly unpleasant interaction between him and the disgraced anti-semite action hero Mel Gibson, and finally a couple of moments where he seemed like he was genuinely tired of being there.
Admitting any genuine emotion from Gervais or anyone else in the Grand Ballroom of the Beverly Hilton hotel opens me up for the possibility of being a complete rube, because there’s just as much chance that it was all calculated for maximum shock value. It was fitting that Jamie Foxx dusted off a Steve Harvey joke (which, by the way, already feels a bit stale) when presenting the award for best original score because society is immediately sceptical when anything goes wrong on live TV. There were those who thought Steve Harvey’s mistake at the Miss Universe pageant was faked for the sake of ratings, and I’m sure there’s equally as many Golden Globes truthers out there. As I’ve said before, the Globes are an intrinsically fallacious, dunderheaded program where even the award winners crack jokes about how their trophies were purchased by a studio marketing department. Why couldn’t this all be a pedantic put-on orchestrated to keep our stubby, normal person fingers slamming keys in order to get the best snark out on Twitter?
Gervais, no matter what you think about him as a comedian, is the ideal person to host a show like that. With his “did I do that?” smirk, he has unlocked the key to a successful awards show hosting stint: be as bored as everyone else. The Academy Awards have failed to find someone to host their show who’s been able to garner the same media approval given to Gervais or Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. That might be because the Oscars’ producers are desperate to maintain a veneer of respectability and Globes producers are greasing the wheels and praying for a 12-car pile-up. Neil Patrick Harris, Ellen DeGeneres, Hugh Jackman, and even Seth MacFarlane all had to present the Oscars like the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. It’s “Hollywood’s biggest night”, after all. Gervais, on the other hand, always looks like he’s trying to find a dank, smelly cave to hide in and a bottle of cheap whisky to chug as soon as possible.
Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we persist in propping up this peculiar tradition through hate-watching, feigned outrage, smarm, and incessant armchair quarterbacking the day after? Awards shows are essentially sporting events without the tantalising, illicit violence – contests with no bearing on society other than the significance we place on them as helpless observers. The Revenant wins and we all try to make it a referendum on the state of cinema. Call me an unrepentant nihilist if you will, but if I’m not nominated for an award, I don’t care who wins.
Gervais’s pub banter and cool guy act manage to tap into the feeling we all have in our hearts when we watch awards shows: it does not matter, it’s a waste of our time, and every show is basically the same week-old cheese in a shiny gold wrapper. Gervais is the audience surrogate, telling those famous people what we all want to say to them, even if it’s cruel, unpleasant, or just not funny. Coming from an English person, the insults almost sound polite. I envy you all for your accents. Even Benny Hill sounded smarter than every American ever. It has to be this way, because it lets everyone off the hook: the network, the producers, the nominees, the presenters, and most of all, the audience. Everything has to be self-aware now. Nothing can be genuine, except for maybe the Super Bowl, because Lord knows the NFL does not have a sense of humour about itself.
As long as Gervais, the little gremlin on your shoulder, can whisper in your ear that what you’re watching is all a bunch of rubbish, you won’t feel quite so bad that you are watching a bunch of rubbish because you can play along through the “magic” of social media. Twitter is like the Golden Globes Hosting Home Game, which allows even the least witty among us to chime in with their 140-character zingers. You can go on Twitter to say how bad the show was, or you can go on Twitter to complain about all the people saying how bad the show was. Or you can whine about how your favourite movie or TV show was “robbed”. There’s a whole buffet of options in the Golden Globes Home Game. It’s up to you how you play.
In this dinner theatre-cum-Big Brother After Dark incarnation of the Golden Globes, the show has become a form of catharsis for our culture. We get to point and laugh at Mel Gibson and cringe at every awful introduction or esoteric industry joke. We are also gifted yet another excuse to get riled up over Quentin Tarantino’s racial politics. His use of the word “ghetto” to describe genres of film music when accepting the best original score trophy on behalf of the composer Ennio Morricone turned social media against him all over again.
It was a further extension of the debate over whether or not Tarantino is allowed to make films that liberally employ the n-word and whether or not he’s allowed to weigh in on black social issues. Here, Twitter was used to fruitlessly debate something with no easy answer. Tarantino, Michael Rapaport and other white celebrities clearly feel some kinship with black people. Rachel Dolezal felt something else entirely, which led her to endeavour to remake her entire appearance to better align with her perceived blackness. Actual black people are divided as to how to respond to these instances of cultural confusion, so I propose we use Twitter and these ephemeral awards shows for something positive.
Here’s my next-level proposal for the 2017 Golden Globe awards: Each year, we elect new honorary black people who are announced at the Globes ceremony. The voting process will be simple. Every black person or biracial person is allowed to vote for candidates generated by a panel of experts. That panel would include the following: me (obviously), Samuel L Jackson, Barack Obama, everyone in the Roots, Taraji P Henson, Chris Rock, LeBron James, Danny Glover, The Rent is Too Damn High Guy and Donald Glover. From there, it’s basically the same rules as the Baseball Hall of Fame. You can only vote for 10 eligible candidates and in order to be made black, you have to be on at least 70% of ballots cast. If you can’t do that, well, you can’t be black. Sorry. That’s the rules. I don’t care how many times you’ve seen Kanye West in concert or cried during The Help. You are not black. If you aren’t elected to blackness after 15 years of eligibility, you can never be black. Ever.
At the Golden Globes, we’d reveal who is black and who isn’t for the year. Obviously, it would be the last award handed out, because there would be plenty of disappointed white people out there and you wouldn’t want them to have to sit through the rest of the show. Not only would this solve the Tarantino controversy forever, it would also liven up a television program sorely lacking in drama. Who wouldn’t stay up past 11pm to see who’d no longer be able to hail a cab in New York City or who’d have to warn their children about the dangers of playing with toy guns in public? I certainly would, Gervais or no.
