GlOBES SHOULD BE BETTER

 With Oscar Nominations out this morning the focus quickly turns to the myriad of activities surrounding the nominees, the films and the show. But before they write the show let’s go back for a moment to review the Golden Globe show and share a thought or two on what I felt went wrong with that one. Hopefully I won’t have to see a repeat on Oscar night.

I know most media I read loved the performances of Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. While they are both brilliant talents when performing in scripted entertainment, neither of them are brilliant stand up comedians, which is a completely different form of comedy.

They spent about 9 minutes simply reading the lamest jokes off a monitor.  Neither of them is particularly good at telling jokes so they just read them off one after another.  If someone calls what they were reading, writing then they should be ashamed of themselves. The jokes were sophomoric, crude, insulting and amateurish.    I envision a room full of adolescent writers going through the list of films and performers and having to come up with something suitably crude and insulting about each one.

The show goes on at 5PM so there are probably kids in the TV audience: Tom Hanks wore a prosthetic genital in Captain Phillips, George Clooney only dates younger women, Matt Damon is garbage and Jona Hill masturbates at his own pool parties are just some of the nonsense they shared with the audience. You want your child to listen to that?

I will never understand why all these shows find it necessary to criticize, through their own warped sense of humor, the work of so many other talented people in the business. Making a film or a television product is one of the most challenging, expensive and risky endeavors for anyone to undertake. Finding good material, the money and dealing with the myriad of things that could, and mostly do, go wrong is a challenge in and of itself. Then to find an actor willing to lose 45 pounds for a role, or spend the entire productions schedule in character, or to put themselves in positions of enormous vulnerability, while acting in the film, and then make a successful role out of the effort is next to impossible.

But year after year all of the hosts feel it necessary to make fun of the craft through the products and the performers, but the material they “read” to share their criticism only gets dumber and dumber as a result. I sometime wonder what some of the so-called comedy writers would do if it were not for body parts.

Crude humor is everywhere today because it is easier to write. Writing something funny that is not crude is difficult and most writers today seem content diving down to the lowest level possible because they don’t have the talent to write well.

Maybe one of these years an award show would take what they do seriously and make jokes at something else, if they still feel the need to ridicule.