The Golden Globe nominations are going to be weirder than ever on Thursday morning. Brace yourselves. Almost nothing they do will correlate with the Oscars no matter how many ‘prognosticators’ bloviate on this subject. The reason is the Hollywood Foreign Press has two divisions: drama, and comedy/musical. But do you remember any musicals this year? “Chicago”? “Dreamgirls’? No. Exactly. So they’ve shoved what should be dramas, but with light touches into comedy/musical.
In this category we now have “American Hustle,” “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “Nebraska,” “Her,” “August: Osage County.” None of these were comedies. “AOC” won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. “Wolf” is about vile people who wrecked their lives and those of others, and went to jail. “Nebraska” is a family drama, just like “AOC.” “American Hustle” is funny, but comedy? “Her” is science fiction, and is somber mostly.
The comedies should be “Enough Said,” “Walter Mitty,” “The Heat,” “This is the End,” and “Anchorman.” Those are comedies.
This makes the whole process you witness on Thursday morning sort of moot. And it’s kind of insulting to the people who makes comedies. Comedy is hard. It’s tricky. The five I just mentioned are top notch and deserve their own category. Oh wait: they had their own category. But now it’s stuffed with dramedies because they’ll have a better chance of winning instead of competing with “12 Years a Slave,” “The Butler,” “Blue Jasmine,” “Gravity,” “Captain Phillips,” and so on.
But it’s what I’ve been saying right along. There are too many movies this year. “Wolf” could easily have waited for 2014. The Globes are going to be a calamity. If you want to know about the Oscars, look at SAG and the AFI. The Globes are just for fun, and nothing else.
