The 2007 Golden Globes

The 2007 Golden Globes was one of the least annoying award shows I have ever sat through from beginning to end, but then, they already had a head start. The Globes have a fighting chance at being fun because they never include a cloying musical number performed by an aging artist — usually Sting when they can’t book Phil Collins — from an animated show I haven’t even heard of. Plus, they do away with the unnecessary banter between presenters that plagues the Oscars, banter that is as painful as any scene from a Ben Stiller movie where everything is going wrong, and just when you think it couldn’t go more wrong, when it seems that is has finally reached the pinnacle of wrongness, a house falls out of the sky and lands directly on the already broken toe of the character who has just found out that the heart he received as a transplant was taken from a third-world dictator who killed orphans as a hobby.
By reviewing an awards show like this I run the risk of sounding like more of a gasbag than I already am, because shouldn’t I be doing more important things with my time? Who cares, right? I’ll go on record and say that I care, I care very deeply, because Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are already doing enough important things to make up for all the time I spent rewinding the TiVo to see just how much of Jennifer Lopez’s boob was poking out of the side of her Marchesa gown. Oh, and Ali Larter? Did you see Ali Larter? I was taking notes so that I could come back here and say something important (see above: must do important things with my time), and at the top of my notes I scribbled this: Ali Larrrrrrrrrsssss……. and then there is a huge drop of drool and a fold in the shape of the side of my face from where I passed out and fell over from dehydration.
Can I be serious here for a second and talk seriously? I was being serious before, but I want to go a step further and lay bare my soul. And it is going to be very scary because of just how vulnerable an admission this is going to be, and I might need you to hold me. But America Ferrera? I cried. She made me cry. Large tears of crying. Because she was just, I don’t know, a real person, with real person feelings and real person hair, and all that silly screaming she did when her show Ugly Betty won Best TV Comedy? Totally ridiculous, and you just know her publicist was mortified, would have shaken her and told her to get a grip if it wasn’t live television. And that made me love her so much more, made me remember what it was like to be that age, that one time I twisted off the top to a Coke bottle to find out that I had won a two dollar gift certificate to 7-11. And oh my God, THAT WAS THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE.
The show was also surprisingly hilarious due in no small part to Sacha Baron Cohen’s acceptance speech in which he gave thanks for the anus and testicles of his costar. That is certainly my kind of acceptance speech, one in which you’re not really sure just how far someone is going to go, and you find yourself relieved that he restrained himself enough to stop right after the description of what it was like to have his face lodged inside someone else’s butt. Every time the camera cut to the audience during his speech you saw all these serious actors losing it, laughing like they have probably not ever laughed before, others not sure if it was okay to laugh, others scared to crack a smile, and that tension combined with all the Moet champagne being guzzled at every table, well, you know that some very nervous executive at NBC was sitting at home in a puddle of his own waste.
And then Forest Whitaker got up there and started choking up, after Eddie Murphy had accepted his award with the most humble speech, after Jennifer Hudson had cried her way through thanking everyone for such an opportunity. It was the most beautiful television I have ever watched, aside from that one episode of Untold Stories of the E.R. where a patient complained of stomach pains and the doctors pulled a Perrier water bottle out of her lower intestine. These Globes were that touching, and the only thing that could have made it the most moving show that has ever aired was if Brad Pitt had accepted an award with his shirt off.