So, how'd those Golden Globes go?

Despite having so, so many reasons not to go forward with this year’s Golden Globes, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association decided to hold a hollowed-out version of the awards show last night anyway. Succession, West Side Story, and The Power Of The Dog won lots of awards, actors and directors received trophies they weren’t there in person to accept, and an absence of rolling cameras mean that pretty much anybody who wasn’t on Twitter during the event had no idea it was still happening at all.

The weirdness of all of this has been captured well in an article by Variety’s Matt Donnelly, who wandered through the mists of Hollywood purgatory and returned with a dispatch about what he witnessed therein.

Donnelly describes arriving at a version of the Beverly Hilton that was much calmer—and emptier—than in years past to enter a show whose new take on a red carpet entrance consisted of “a lone check-in table flanked by COVID-19 compliance officers.” As expected, “not one famous face, top executive, or notable publicity rep could be spotted” among the estimated 200 HFPA members who showed up.

He writes that “tumbleweeds may as well have blown through the marble corridors” of the Hilton, that “front desk staff and idle workers at the rooftop lounge lamented how slow the day had been,” but that the HFPA members who did show up provided “thunderous applause” for big winners and pre-taped celebrity videos. These brave souls were also given an opportunity to pose for selfies in front of a wall with the HFPA logo on it and received “white plastic [gift] bags about the size of a pair of Manolo Blahniks.”

Otherwise, Donnelly writes that the event barely managed a level of “gravitas above that of a medical convention banquet.” This is illustrated best when he describes how, early in the evening, a couple walked through the check-in line of “guests in formal wear [while wearing] their hotel bathrobes, carrying books and towels from an afternoon by the pool.”

It all kind of seems like none of this needed to go forward at all—like, perhaps, the HFPA might have seemed more committed to its promises to reform the busted awards ceremony by going properly dark for a single year.

Oh well. At least this cat, biased toward all kinds of Garfields, seems happy with how everything went.

Read the entire article over at Variety.

Send Great Job, Internet tips to [email protected]