We Really Didn’t Need the Commentary During the Golden Globes
Another Golden Globes has come and gone, kicking off the award season in a unique fashion. The show doesn’t just forecast who might win an Oscar in a few weeks, or cement who won an Emmy all the way back in the past fall. In some ways, you can argue that it sets the tone for whatever is about to happen during Hollywood’s flashiest time of the year… in good ways, and in bad.
Sunday’s telecast of the 83rd Golden Globes featured two on-air personalities, ET‘s Kevin Frazier and Variety‘s Marc Malkin, as the night’s emcees. In addition to taking the show in and out of commercial breaks, and reading the lists of nominees in pre-recorded sound bites, the duo were particularly present once each category’s winner was announced.
As each winner made their way onstage — a task that could potentially be arduous, given how far away they were placed in the Globes’ seating chart — Frazier and Malkin vamped about the winner and the project they just won for. Most of the time, these were pre-written observations, or asides that Malkin had from having interviewed the winner on a recent red carpet. But the actual content of these sound bites got lost in how chaotically they were presented, especially amid everything else that was going on each time.
This… didn’t work!
This wasn’t just because Malkin has an incredibly distinct voice, and a reputation among the chronically-online for going viral for asking incredibly awkward or arguably misguided questions in hopes of getting the biggest sound bite. It also wasn’t because the idea of a notable emcee or “voice of god” at an award show is inherently bad, because it’s not: Nick Offerman did excellently in the role at last year’s Oscars, and there are hundreds more great examples before him. It was because this specific execution of the idea only added more clutter to the night: most of the asides weren’t particularly groundbreaking, and they were piped in on top of a soundtrack of bizarre music cues that already sounded like they came from a bar mitzvah DJ on a mission.
It added another layer of clutter to one of the most natural parts of the process of awards season. It seemed to insinuate that the audience couldn’t be trusted to stay interested during the amount of time it would take for a winner to get onstage. Again, it didn’t help that that process sometimes stretched on for several minutes, given the awkward layout of the Globes’ seating chart. But it made me so much more antsy for the winners to get onstage and begin their speech, because that would at least be a reprieve from the emceeing for a few minutes.
It messed with the flow of a Globes telecast that already cut some bizarre corners. Sinners composer Ludwig Göransson’s win for Best Original Score was inexplicably presented during a commercial break, The Secret Agent director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s acceptance speech for Best Foreign Language Film was the only one noticeably cut off with music, and the closest thing we got to an In Memoriam segment was host Nikki Glazer briefly wearing a Spinal Tap baseball cap. And yet, the show had time to repeatedly spotlight Paramount’s controversial new partnership of UFC, plug a sports betting service that seemed to predict the winners a segment before they were announced, and basically let Judd Apatow perform an entire stand-up routine before announcing the winner for Best Director.
More than celebrating the winners or enjoying the ambitious fashion choices, it all just made me walk away from the Globes feeling weird. Hopefully, that won’t be the case for the rest of this awards season.
(featured image: Amy Sussman/Getty Images)
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