Raw sewage and Jacqueline Bisset's feelings: Everything that was spewed at this year's Golden Globes
Last night all of Hollywood’s biggest stars gathered to create the year’s new crop of memes and reaction GIFS—all save for a select few, like George Clooney and Brad Pitt, who were relocated to a bunker as a safeguard against meteors, in order to preserve the celebrity hierarchy. If you missed the ceremony itself, you can relive it through confusing, now completely context-free quips by replaying our T.V. Club live chat. But here are some of the salient points.
On the red carpet, all eyes were on the raw sewage. For once, this was not a euphemism for E!’s pre-show coverage, but rather the filthy black ooze that spewed forth from a burst sewer pipe, just hours before guests were set to arrive. Everyone agreed that it looked stunning and metaphorical. Most of it was cleaned up before the show, sparing your favorite stars from answering Giuliana Rancic’s question of “Who are you wearing?” with “A symbol of our culture’s creeping moral decay.”
But in the red carpet contest of “who spewed raw sewage best,” E! refused to be upstaged by some pipe:
Amy Poehler and Tina Fey were very funny and charming, for the 15 collective minutes they were allowed on stage. Sidestepping last year’s Taylor Swift “controversy,” the returning duo reserved their choicest zingers for how George Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio both like to sleep with hot young ladies. (“It’s true! We have so much sex!” a wounded DiCaprio no doubt said, drying his tears on the Victoria’s Secret catalog he uses to order dates.) They did some more good crowd work, ably assisted by Julia Louis-Dreyfus—whose cutaway gags of refusing a selfie with Reese Witherspoon and eating a hot dog made her a sort of silent co-host—and a surprisingly game Bono, and they did the kind of weird improv bit with Poehler playing Fey’s son “Randy” that only those two could have pulled off. But overlong speeches and technical gaffes (see below, or the rest of the show) meant they more or less disappeared for huge stretches. Funny how ads spend months playing up the idea of “spending the night with Tina and Amy,” only to have their cumulative screen time work out to roughly the length of Jacqueline Bisset accepting an award. Speaking of which…
Jacqueline Bisset became the new go-to reference for rambling acceptance speeches. Jacqueline Bisset had never won a Golden Globe, despite being nominated several times since 1968, and she spent her moment accepting Best Supporting Actress in a Miniseries making sure the Hollywood Foreign Press Association felt every intervening year. After a long walk from the Beverly Hilton hinterlands, delayed by her stopping to kiss Jon Voight—which was not, as it turned out, some new HFPA regulation—Bisset delivered a halting speech comprised of platitudes about aging, dealing with critics, and her mother, all of which she’d apparently been saving up for decades. You can watch it yourself, unless you have something to do today.
Nobody wanted to party with Diddy. The erstwhile Puff Daddy presented the awards for Best Score and Best Original Song, merited by his own past duet with Godzilla, and demonstrated admirable restraint in not shouting “Ciroc!” Unfortunately, not everyone was as interested as Diddy was in his story about being on a yacht in St. Barths with All Is Lost composer Alex Ebert—you know, maybe because it’s a movie about a shipwreck, and also, if we wanted to hear how Diddy spends his leisure time, we’d listen to one of his albums and also live in 1999. For the general reaction of the room summed up in one image, look no further than this picture of Bono realizing just in time that Diddy is trying to hug him.
Everyone wanted to party with Emma Thompson. Seriously, who would you rather be on a yacht with in St. Barths? Emma Thompson or fucking Puffy?
The tribute to Woody Allen was as awkward as a Woody Allen movie. First Diane Keaton ended her heartfelt, Annie Hall-esque ramble about the absent Allen with a rendition of “Make New Friends” that was like the last sound you hear before a pack of Victorian porcelain dolls comes to life and kills you. Then Mia Farrow’s son Ronan weighed in on Twitter with this cutting reminder of who they were paying tribute to—a confusing mélange of funny and unsettling feelings that actually sums up Woody Allen quite well.
One of the year’s biggest tributes to entertainment still has no idea how to put on a show. Technical gaffes were everywhere, from the bizarrely long stretch of censored silence that made it seem as though Diane Keaton let loose with a filthy string of “cocksucker cocksucker cocksucker”—yet still couldn’t stop Jacqueline Bisset from saying “shit”—to the teleprompter screw-up that left Jonah Hill and Margot Robbie reading from a hastily procured scrap of paper. And when Tina Fey made the joke about giving a warm welcome to Leonardo DiCaprio, like “a supermodel’s vagina,” the control room panicked, sending the video sync into a weird temporal loop that suggested we’re all still living in the epilogue to Inception. Add in the constant audio dropouts, the baffling seating plans that required winners to first solve the maze and slay the Minotaur before taking the stage, and the incongruous camera cutaways (“Give me Tom Hanks looking bemused again!”), and the question persists: Why is a night dedicated to honoring show business so poorly choreographed? Is it because all the skilled people in Hollywood are in the room partying?
Brooklyn Nine-Nine is the best comedy on television already, apparently. It’s only aired 12 episodes—88 fewer episodes than Michael Schur’s also-nominated, yet perennially snubbed Parks And Recreation—yet the HFPA feels that the freshman Fox comedy and its star Andy Samberg are already the funniest things on TV. The Globes have a history of recognizing series in their rookie year, so it’s not too surprising; Brooklyn Nine-Nine now joins a lineage of past freshmen winners like The Cosby Show, The Golden Girls, The Wonder Years, Ally McBeal, and, uh, Cybill and Brooklyn Bridge. But hey, for those who believe the show mostly just has the potential to be great right now, the Globes win now pretty much guarantees it a second season to live up to that.
Amy Poehler won for Parks And Recreation, and Bryan Cranston and Breaking Bad both won. So really, nothing else matters.
The complete list of winners:
FILM
BEST MOTION PICTURE — DRAMA
12 Years A Slave
BEST MOTION PICTURE — MUSICAL OR COMEDY
American Hustle
BEST DIRECTOR — MOTION PICTURE
Alfonso Cuarón, Gravity
BEST ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE — DRAMA
Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club
BEST ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE — DRAMA
Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine
BEST ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE — COMEDY OR MUSICAL
Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf Of Wall Street
BEST ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE — MUSICAL OR COMEDY
Amy Adams, American Hustle
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE
Jared Leto, Dallas Buyers Club
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE
Jennifer Lawrence, American Hustle
BEST SCREENPLAY — MOTION PICTURE
Spike Jonze, Her
BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
The Great Beauty
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM
Frozen
BEST ORIGINAL SCORE – MOTION PICTURE
Alex Ebert, All Is Lost
BEST ORIGINAL SONG — MOTION PICTURE
“Ordinary Love,” U2 (Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom)
TV
BEST TV SERIES – DRAMA
Breaking Bad
BEST TV SERIES — COMEDY
Brooklyn Nine-Nine
BEST MINISERIES OR TV MOVIE
Behind The Candelabra
BEST ACTOR IN A TV SERIES – DRAMA
Bryan Cranston, Breaking Bad
BEST ACTRESS IN A TV SERIES – DRAMA
Robin Wright, House Of Cards
BEST ACTOR IN A TV SERIES – MUSICAL OR COMEDY
Andy Samberg, Brooklyn Nine-Nine
BEST ACTRESS IN A TV SERIES — MUSICAL OR COMEDY
Amy Poehler, Parks And Recreation
BEST ACTOR IN A MINISERIES OR TV MOVIE
Michael Douglas, Behind The Candelabra
BEST ACTRESS IN A MINISERIES OR TV MOVIE
Elisabeth Moss, Top Of The Lake
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A SERIES, MINISERIES, OR TV MOVIE
Jon Voight, Ray Donovan
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A SERIES, MINISERIES, OR TV MOVIE
Jacqueline Bisset, Dancing On The Edge