Opinion America’s sweethearts
At the Golden Globe awards, an unusually gender-aware ceremony, as funny as it was on point.
At the Golden Globe awards, an unusually gender-aware ceremony, as funny as it was on point
Pop culture aficionados will be undoubtedly pleased to know that the contrived “debate” over whether women can be funny was unequivocally settled by two of the funniest people in Hollywood, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Tasked with the often thankless job — just ask Ricky Gervais — of co-hosting, for the second time in a row, the award show which ushers in a long month or so of self-congratulatory Hollywood idolatry, Fey and Poehler were warm yet caustic — and never more so than on the subject of women in the film industry.
In their opening monologue, they poked fun at matinee idol George Clooney for his dating history: his film, Gravity, was described as the story of an astronaut who “would rather float away into space and die rather than spend one more minute with a woman his own age”, even if that woman is Sandra Bullock. August: Osage County was hailed as a movie that proved that “there are still great parts in Hollywood for Meryl Streeps over 60”. Matthew McConaughey, who won Best Actor in a Drama for his role as an HIV positive cowboy Dallas Buyers Club, got a shoutout, too.
He lost 45 pounds for the movie, or, as Fey and Poehler put it, did “what actresses call being in a movie”. Fey got in a salty dig about Leonardo DiCaprio’s preference for supermodels.
A bit of gender-bending came into play, too, when Fey and Poehler gently mocked the awards tradition of a Miss Golden Globes — usually the young daughter of celebrities — by introducing Mr Golden Globes, Fey’s “adult son, Randy”, actually Poehler in a ridiculous wig, “in the interest of gender equality”.
It was an unusually gender-aware awards ceremony, one that did well to underscore, gently and appropriately for the occasion, Hollywood’s still-sexist treatment of its actresses. If one of the better ways to subvert gender norms is to make fun of them, the Golden Globes ceremony was an object lesson in doing it right, thanks to Fey and Poehler.
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