The Golden Globes: Jamie Foxx's One-Man Rave Momentarily Breaks The Boredom
We tried to blog the Golden Globes last night. Really, we did. We plopped down on the sofa with laptop in hand, stiff drink at the ready, and drugs no more than an arm's length away, but then a strange thing happened. About three minutes in, we got bored. Not your run-of-the-mill, syndicated-Friends-rerun-on-in-the-background bored. This was a boredom that burrowed deep into the DNA, completely paralyzing the brain's pleasure centers and erasing memories of what is was ever like to be entertained. We upped the doses of the drugs and booze, trying to self-medicate our way out of this awards show anhedonia. Aren't the Globes where everyone's supposed to get lit up and say all kinds of outrageous stuff?
This is how bad it got, around the half-hour mark of the ceremony: We were BEGGING for a musical number.
And then bargaining with God for some stilted, overscripted banter from the presenters. What did we get? Claire Danes nearly asphyxiating while trying to pronounce "Mariska Hargitay," a dead-eyed, teetering Lisa Marie Presley (in a cape!), the robot that killed Annette Bening and took her place so that it could deliver an endless, flat speech. Even Jim Carrey, a man who spent the better part of the 90's speaking through his anus, could offer nothing more than some half-hearted, pidgin Italian when he introduced the head of the Hollywood Foreign Press. Whither the ass-ventriloquism? Not here.
Then, almost exactly two hours in, Jamie Foxx tried to save the whole show by himself. He stepped onstage—well, it was more like he rolled onstage—to accept his award for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy, and immediately engaged the crowd in some orgiastic call-and-response (UNNHHH! Uh. UNNNHHHHH! Uh.) Before we could say, "I want to be on whatever this guy is on," Foxx said, "I wish I could take what I'm feeling and bottle it and put it in the water supply and then everyone will love each other a little more." He refrained from running his tongue up and down the award, but all that was missing from his performance were the glowsticks and the pacifiers.
After the Globes joyfully and all too briefly pumped away on top of us during Jamie Foxx's one-man rave, it rolled over and went to sleep. Boredom returned. Naps may have been taken. Mercifully, it ended. Eventually.
For all three hours of stultifying punishment it dealt us, did the Globes have any real usefulness as an Oscar barometer? Jamie Foxx and Clive Owen and Leonardo DiCaprio won. Sideways and The Aviator won. Annette Bening and Hilary Swank won. Thanks, Hollywood Foreign Press, for clearing everything up. See you next year. We have to go find Jamie Foxx's dealer before the Oscars.