By Dee-Dum
Edited by shrrshrr

[Editor’s note: the views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily of MediaBlvd or its affiliates.]

Hey everyone, the Golden Globe awards are out! In the immortal words of someone-or-other, “Who cares?”

The Golden Globe awards are easily the most over-hyped awards in all of entertainment. They have less credibility than the People’s Choice Awards, the American Music Awards, and the Blockbuster Video Store Awards put together. How they ever became a weather vane for Oscar nominees and winners is inexplicable.

I could point out that the Golden Globe people are the ones who gave an award to Pia Zadora and end my argument there. Pia Zadora. Pia Freakin’ Zadora. Her husband was a bazillion-aire and he supposedly bribed, er...gave gifts to, every member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, or at least to enough of them to get her the coveted 1982 Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer. Pia Zadora.

How is this possible? Easy - the people who decide the Golden Globe Awards, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, consist of about 84 members; these people have absolutely no training or qualifications to prefer one film over another, or one performance over another. They are reporters assigned to cover Hollywood. Oh, and they’re foreigners, if you didn’t pick that up from their name. An Italian newspaper assigns some random person to cover Hollywood, and that person gets to choose who gets an award nomination. At least with the Oscars actors vote to nominate actors, cinematographers vote to nominate cinematographers, and so on.

One story that circulated about the decision making process for the Golden Globes is that the studio that produced Scent of a Woman paid for the entire HFPA to take a junket to New York City, where they were put up in a four star hotel, wined and dined, and allowed to interview Al Pacino ad nauseum. The result was a surprise nomination and win for Best Actor in a Drama, which was followed by his not surprising win at the Oscars.

…Which raises another cockamamie aspect of the Golden Globe awards - the categories. This year Joaquin Phoenix won for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy for Walk the Line. Wait a second…Walk the Line was a comedy? It sure wasn’t a musical; at no point did anyone start singin’ in the rain or dancing in the dark. The same thing happened last year with Ray, which was also inexplicably put in the comedy/musical category. I admit, though, it is nice that they separate out comedy films as a category, as this gives people who would NEVER have a shot at an Oscar nomination some faint glory (Jim Carrey, mostly).

The Golden Globe awards admittedly do one thing well - they find offbeat television performances that would otherwise be overlooked by the incredibly stodgy Emmy people. Tony Shaloub probably never would have gotten an Emmy nomination, much less an award, for starring in an hour long detective show on basic cable, had he not first been anointed with a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy. The same goes for Michael Chiklis’ Emmy for The Shield.

Still, any relationship between winning a Golden Globe and deserving an Oscar is largely happenstance. But then I suppose one could equally argue that any correlation between winning an Oscar and quality is a matter of luck. Still, why the general public and Oscar voter put stock in the opinion of a few dozen foreign reporters is a mystery.