Brad Pitt, left, as Benjamin Button and Cate Blanchett, right, as Daisy in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
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Critics vs. Party Hosts
Members of the New York, L.A. and D.C. groups are actual movie critics, the employees of local (and a few national) newspapers and magazines — which means they should probably be petitioning Congress for a bailout. ("Senator, if we don't get money and job security right now, it could have a disastrous impact on American blurb-writing. Adjectives like riveting, blistering and unforgettable, not to mention all our cherished W's — warm, winsome, winning, wonderful — could simply disappear. And all that prose is produced right here in the U.S. of A.!")
The resumés of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association are a little more obscure. Few make a full-time living as movie critics for their international publications; most are showbiz reporters, celebrity hawks, gossip paragraphists. Legend had it that in the Association's early days, some HFPA members were only vagrantly attached to news organs, and that once a year they'd get to host a party for the movie stars whose hair they'd dressed or cars they'd parked. Whatever the journalistic provenance of the HFPA members, their ability to commandeer a Sunday night on a major television network (all right, a once-major network: NBC) made the Golden Globe dinner the starriest show around. And that luster helped legitimize the awards and their selectors. (See TIME's list of the top 100 films)
It's also clear that the tastes of the HFPA are those of official Hollywood. The films they nominated this year reflect the taste of the movie elite and their publicists. These are the pictures the industry wants to be remembered by. Until now, you hadn't seen Kate Winslet's name in this story, because she didn't win any of the critics' awards. (Though some magazine reviewer named her Best Actress of 2008.) Well, she snagged a Globe nomination for Actress – Drama in Revolutionary Road and Supporting Actress in her other December drama, The Reader; both were among the five finalists for Best Motion Picture – Drama. The others were Slumdog, Benjamin Button and one film, Frost/Nixon, that didn't figure prominently in the critics' fancies. (Doubt was aced out of a Best Drama nod, but did earn nominations for all four principal actors: Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams and — woo hoo! — Viola Davis.)
To pad their nominations, the Globes breaks movies and lead performances into drama (where most of the serious contenders reside) and comedy or musical. For Globe-watchers, that's the fun part. How to find five comedies? This year the wild card was In Bruges, the madly violent crime farce from Anglo-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh. The critics groups paid the movie no mind, but it and its stars, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson got Globe nominations. The Comedy or Musical category is also the consolation spot for actors nudged out of the more competitive Drama department; so James Franco, surely worthy of a Supporting Actor citation as Harvey Milk's lover and friend, instead was a Comedy finalist as the dope dealer in the Judd Apatow-produced Pineapple Express.
In fact, the scent of weed was redolent among Globe finalists. Robert Downey, Jr., who might have been named for his starring role in Iron Man — except that the HFPA, like the other critics groups, has an unwritten rule outlawing blockbuster action pictures — found a place in Supporting Actor, as the doped-out, blackfaced Method actor in Tropic Thunder (also from the Apatow factory). He was joined in that category by another Thunder actor, Tom Cruise. He does a splendidly sulfurous comic turn as a movie studio exec; but, as the Globe committee hardly needs to be reminded, he's also Tom Cruise. (See TIME's Top 10 Tom Cruise Roles)
That's how the Foreign Press Association member do things. For its Best Original Song – Motion Picture slot, they rounded up five folks not primarily associated with movie songwriting: Clint Eastwood, Miley Cyrus, Beyoncé, Peter Gabriel and Bruce Springsteen. Critics in other groups may scratch their heads at the inclusion of this category, and especially of this year's honorees. The HFPA just sees it as another way to put famous fannies. The real critics groups have the freedom to honor their preferred films, whether hits or cult items; but the Globers have a sterner agenda. What matters to them is not what movies win but who's in the audience, and the roll call of nominations is their list for a fabulous party.