The 76^th Gold­en Globes – a night in soundbites

Last night, the Gold­en Globes descend­ed once again on the Bev­er­ly Hilton ball­room in Los Ange­les to acknowl­edge the finest achieve­ments of the past year in film and tele­vi­sion, which turned out to be Green Book and Bohemi­an Rhapsody.

While the slate of win­ners came as some­thing of a sur­prise to many – the most polite way of char­ac­ter­iz­ing a white-hot fury that con­sumed cinephile cor­ners of the inter­net in sec­onds fol­low­ing these announce­ments – the show itself remained a source of enter­tain­ment and spec­ta­cle all its own.

San­dra Oh and Andy Sam­berg took on an unen­vi­able task when they agreed to host the pro­ceed­ings in a year chock­ablock with con­tro­ver­sy, but they kept the mood light while duly acknowl­edg­ing the shift­ing mores of race and gen­der in Hol­ly­wood. Top­i­cal con­cerns dom­i­nat­ed the awards speech­es as well, as tal­ent voiced their sup­port for women and peo­ple of col­or still stak­ing out their cor­ner of a crowd­ed, large­ly homo­ge­neous business.

Below, we’ve sin­gled out a hand­ful of sound­bites from the evening’s events as a sort of awards-show digest, a con­densed ver­sion of an event where everyone’s got some­thing to say.

“Gra­cias famil­ia, y gra­cias México.”

Alfon­so Cuarón gave one of the night’s most enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly applaud­ed speech­es as he accept­ed the Best Direc­tor prize for his mon­u­men­tal Roma, empha­siz­ing a sen­ti­ment of uni­ty across America’s south­ern bor­der. Though he didn’t make any explic­it men­tions of the cur­rent Com­man­der-in-Chief, he called on cin­e­ma to ​“tear down walls and build bridges to new cul­tures,” and his final words ren­der the per­son­al as polit­i­cal. In issu­ing a sim­ple thank-you to his com­mu­ni­ty through his native Span­ish, hard­ly a notable phrase, he cre­at­ed a tac­it sym­bol that a glob­al pres­ence in Amer­i­can excel­lence should be under­stood as the norm from here on out.

“We are women and nur­tur­ers, we have our chil­dren, and our hus­bands, if we are lucky enough, our part­ners, who­ev­er. But we have to find per­son­al fulfilment.”

After hav­ing mis­tak­en­ly not giv­en Glenn Close a Gold­en Globe sev­er­al times over the past few decades, the Hol­ly­wood For­eign Press Asso­ci­a­tion got it togeth­er and rec­og­nized the actress for her role in rela­tion­ship dra­ma The Wife. In it, she plays a stymied writer held back both pro­fes­sion­al­ly and roman­ti­cal­ly by her hus­band, and Close used her speech to issue a call-to-arms to women every­where that they must seek their own hap­pi­ness. As indus­try ini­tia­tives encour­age young girls to expand their ambi­tions beyond movie star­dom to pro­duc­ing, shoot­ing, and edit­ing, this mes­sage of pos­si­bil­i­ty rings a touch louder.

“I’m not fool­ing myself, next year could be dif­fer­ent, it prob­a­bly will be, but right now this moment is real. Because I see you, all of these faces of change, and now, so will every­one else.”

Between the one-lin­ers, San­dra Oh used the plat­form of the open­ing mono­logue to issue some weight­i­er thoughts about the #MeToo and Time’s Up move­ments purg­ing sex­u­al pre­da­tion from the enter­tain­ment busi­ness. She expressed the nag­ging doubt that the progress made so far may not be suf­fi­cient, or last­ing, or ongo­ing, but stressed the vital­i­ty of hope in such try­ing days. How­ev­er a per­son might define our cur­rent ​“moment”, it’s giv­en due cause for opti­mism. One scan of the assem­bled crowd con­firmed it for her.

“Thank you to Satan for giv­ing me inspi­ra­tion to play this role.”

Peren­ni­al awards favorite Chris­t­ian Bale picked up some new hard­ware for his turn as the grum­bling, paunch-bel­lied Dick Cheney in Adam McK­ay​‘s satir­i­cal Vice. Up at the podi­um, he made no bones about his mod­el for the for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent, trad­ing the usu­al com­par­i­son point of Darth Vad­er for a more tra­di­tion­al per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of evil on Earth. Whether these inflam­ma­to­ry words have got­ten back to the iron chrysalis in which the real Cheney slum­bers, we do not yet know.

“You know what race of peo­ple gets under my skin? The Hol­ly­wood marathon.”

Andy Sam­berg mas­saged some time­ly mate­r­i­al into his side of the open­ing mono­logue as well, though he stuck with lev­i­ty while doing so. Here, a groan-wor­thy pun car­ries more weight than usu­al; the first half cues up oxy­gen-drain­ing dis­com­fort in the room, until the sec­ond half reframes big­otry as a pedes­tri­an traf­fic com­plaint. Phew.