From the Golden Globes after-party thrown by the Weinstein Company. Actually it's Dominick Dunne who might have thought this was the Oscars, and that he was at the Vanity Fair party, and that Paris Hilton was Hedy Lamarr.
Update: Did you know there's a guy named Dominic Dunn who is an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT OLD DUDE WITH GLASSES than Dominick Dunne? Yeah, us neither.
Obviously looking to stir up some trouble, an anonymous tipster dropped us this note about the conspicuous table-hopping activities of Paramount emperor Brad Grey, whose various fiefdoms came away with awards for Dreamgirls and Babel:
· Jeremy Piven (for some reason, E! Online's Kristin Veitch refers to him as "Mr. Ari Fleiss," but we're pretty sure she means Ari Gold, and not some Hollywood agent/madame hybrid) ditched his date at the after parties for someone younger, hotter, and who didn't give birth to him: Melrose Bickerstaff, better known as the runner-up on the latest season of America's Next Top Model. They were "flirting, smooching and displaying all sorts of couple-like behavior." His Entourage spouse Perrey Reeves, meanwhile, consoled Bubbe Piven, who tearfully questioned why he couldn't "just find a nice girl without a ridiculous-sounding shiksa name." [E! Online]
· The Weinsteins' party was packed despite having only Bobby in contention. After some face time at the Fox party, Rupert Murdoch popped by, then cozied up to Harvey, who suggested a trip to the Bahamas, conjuring unsettling images of the two in bathing suits. [Slate]
· Moët & Chandon set up a booth at the end of red carpet arrivals, where they provided guests with mini bottles of champagne outfitted with complicated flute/straw mechanisms. A baffled Leonardo DiCaprio was later heard yelping in pain when he mistook the libation for a carbonated eye wash. [The Envelope]
Even on Hollywood's Second Biggest (And First Drunkest) Night, Isaiah "Dr. McChokey" Washington found himself unable to escape the lingering spectre of Chokegate, in which the homophobic slur Washington allegedly hurled while in the middle of a high-minded debate with co-star Patrick Dempsey over their professional relationship launched other co-star T.R. Knight out of the primetime closet. While Washington offered a red carpet soundbite expressing his unbridled enthusiasm for all things queer ("'I love gay. I wanted to be gay,' he said. 'Please let me be gay'"), the controversy-hungry press corps wouldn't let him off the hook when he arrived backstage following Grey's Anatomy's Globe win. Reports Access Hollywood:
As audience members were still dabbing their tear ducts with linen napkins in response to America Ferrera's moving acceptance speech for her Best Actress In A Television Series - Musical or Comedy win for Ugly Betty, off-camera goons clearly directed the overcome young actress Maria Menounos's way for her mandated, "You just won a Golden Globe! How does that make you feel?" moment of backstage awkwardness. Ferrara stood helplessly as Menounos parroted the prattle fed into the earpiece skillfully hidden beneath her flat-ironed hair, then bravely attempted an escape before tear-gas and tazer-equipped NBC gold coats helpfully ushered her back in front of the camera so she could answer such pressing, big-moment-deflating questions as, "What do you say to all those people out there who did not want you to play Ugly Betty?" before fearfully rejecting her interrogator's insistent demands that she use the compulsory screen time to provide a list of names she might have forgotten to thank in her acceptance speech.
Showing the same kind of unfailing dedication to a comedy bit that led the actor to never launder his trademark gray suit or properly use Western-style bodily waste elimination devices during months of in-character press obligations (while Fox publicists undoubtedly tired of toting takeaway feces bags for excited journalists, the exacting actor demanded they be available for all junket participants), Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen offered this behind-the-scenes look at how co-star's Ken Davitian's anus—the subject of Cohen's Golden Globes victory speech—not only made his performance possible, but nearly turned their movie into a faux-documentary snuff film:
We know that we harbor absurdly high expectations for awards shows, and that anything short of witnessing a despondent Leonardo DiCaprio dousing himself in the alcohol that is so readily available at these events, taking the stage in the middle of Forest Whitaker's emotional victory speech, and spectacularly self-immolating to atone for his public failure to win the trophy despite comprising 40 percent of the Best Dramatic Actor field all by himself will leave us feeling empty and disappointed. Still, we wonder if even such a magnificent tableau as the one above would satisfy; deep in our hearts, we suspect that performers can never possibly be drunk enough, dispirited enough, or engulfed in the raging flames of nullification enough to please us, the jaded kudocast viewer. But still we watch, because settling in for three-plus hours of watching well-dressed famous people handing gilded trinkets to other famous people (who then go on to recite a list of names of still more people, some of them familiar to us) momentarily makes us feel better about the acute lack of attractive celebrities handing us shiny objects in our own, small, tragically un-televised lives.
· The 12th annual Critics' Choice Awards Friday night gave The Departed best picture and best director, while Dreamgirls and Little Miss Sunshine take four awards apiece, and Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker take lead acting awards in the races for which they were considered the favorites. Scorsese's Oscar hopes are raised as never before, but the threat of a Lucciesque disappointment lingers. [The Envelope]
· The AFI Awards keeps the proceedings painless, with few speeches, lots of clips, and everyone out the door by 2 p.m. [Variety]
· The Scripter award—going to the pairing of a screenwriter and the author of the book upon which its based—goes to The Children of Men author P.D. James, and the movie's screenwriting team. [THR]
· The Golden Globes air tonight (with a three-hour delay for us—thanks, NBC!), and you know what that means: Yes, a song that's gotten an obnoxious amount of radio play this year will be rerecorded by session singers, with lyrics rewritten to incorporate many nominees! ("I remember when, I remember, I remember when I saw Dreamgirls! Do Globes make us crazy? Globes make us crazy!") [HFPA.org]
· Bonus Golden Globes Governator surprise: Arnold Schwarzenegger will announce the Best Motion Picture Drama. [NBC4.tv]
Let it never be said that Jake Gyllenhaal doesn't know where his gay-icon bread is buttered: to kick off his SNL hosting gig this past weekend, the dreamy-eyed triple-threat deftly offered an air-kiss to fans of his legendary cowboy-bottom turn in Brokeback Mountain, then got down to the dirty business of winning back the hearts of any fans that may have been momentarily captured by Jennifer Hudson's moving™ rendition of that Dreamgirls song. Right about now, a half-dozen male Golden Globes nominees are frantically calling their writer friends (sadly, even Borat himself probably can't pull off the gag now, as much as we wanted to see it), begging them for new victory speech bits, knowing that their hilariously off-key thunder has been stolen by last year's most high-profile Globes snubbee. On the bright side, now we probably don't have to see Forest Whitaker whip off a breakaway tuxedo and bound into the audience to lovingly serenade double-nominee Leonardo DiCaprio with a show tune.
As we mentioned earlier, vying for the attentions of sauced celebrities piling out of the Beverly Hilton ballroom after the Golden Globes ceremony is a new event on the block: The "Golden Green" party, in the Hilton-adjacent former Robinsons-May retail space, is being co-presented by E! Network and the Environmental Media Association, and it plans on eschewing the wasteful extravagances of your typical Hollywood awards show bash for more eco-friendly party favors:
· The HFPA has reached an agreement with the IRS over Golden Globes gift boxes, meaning the government will see their rightful cut of the luxury giveaways from years past. Starting this year, the gift boxes will be done away with entirely, depriving stars from the satisfaction of overturning them onto their tables, rummaging through the contents, then agitatedly sweep the pile of gadgets, sunglasses, and spa vouchers to the floor, and saying "There's no fucking iPhone in here. Anyone want this crap?" [HFPA.org]
· Vogue's Andre Leon Talley will host an Oscar fashion show in the Academy lobby, featuring "many of the spectacular dresses that have been worn to the Oscars through the years." Quick: Think of three, not including Cher or Bjork's swan dress. Not that easy, is it? Memory loves ugly. [Variety]
· Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest picks up five People's Choice Awards, and Halle Berry, accepting for Favorite Female Action Star for X-Men: The Last Stand, begged "every person in the room" who wants to see another X-Men movie to "write letters! Write a letter to Tom Rothman at Fox and tell him so." Good thing she didn't ask the viewers at home to do the same, or Tom Rothman would have been flooded with mail pretty soon! [InsideSocal]
· A distribution of nominations according to studio puts Paramount Pictures at the head of the pack with 15, not including Paramount Vantage's 7 for Babel. You can bet the hugs were flying at Vantage today! [GoldDerby]
· If you caught a replay of the nomination announcements this morning (or, heavens forfend, actually woke up to watch them), then you probably caught an ethereal Jessica Biel's shimmering cascade of giggles as she twice had to read the words Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. You then fell back to Earth with a thud when permanent grouch-face Matthew Perry approached the podium to cough up his list of nominees. [Reuters]
· Nominee quote orgy! The Gloater: "I'm just going to sit and bask in people's envy." -Justin Kirk. The Anhedonic: "Our film is really about enjoying the experience of life...and not getting caught up in the contest." -Jonathan Dayton, co-director, Little Miss Sunshine. The Liar: "It is a privilege to be mentioned in the same breath with actors like...Will Smith..." -Leonardo DiCaprio. [AP]
· Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry describes the typical writers' room post nomination announcement celebration: "I will probably toast my writing staff with Diet Coke and we'll spend about 10 minutes talking about it and then we'll just jump back into work," putting their celebration at roughly five times the duration of the one Teri Hatcher and Eva Longoria have planned for their nominated co-stars, Marcia Cross and Felicity Huffman. [AP]
Just hours after the Golden Globe nominations were announced, better entertainment news bureaus everywhere were on the phone with the lucky, chosen few, who shared their "where they were" moments (let's get a handle of things, folks—these are the Globes we're talking about) and their initial reactions (generally positive, save for double nominee Clint Eastwood, who felt the final installment of his WWII trilogy—a YouTube video of a hamster making its way through a video game prison camp—was sorely overlooked.) A round-up:
· Best "where were you" answer definitely goes to Babel director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, who was stumbling in from a party at 5:30 a.m. to find his wife still awake, watching the results. Nice save, Gonzalez! You know you were toast without the nomination. [Variety]
· Sacha Baron Cohen delivers this statement: "I have been trying to let Borat know this great news but for the last 4 hours both of Kazakhstan's telephones have been engaged. Eventually, Premier Nazarbayev answered and said he would pass on the message as soon as Borat returned from Iran, where he is guest of honor at the Holocaust Denial Conference." [The Hot Blog]
· The WGA nominations were announced today, and HBO is the only TV network (not that it's TV) with two series in each of the major categories (Deadwood and Sopranos/Curb Your Enthusiasm and Entourage). NBC, meanwhile, picks up four of the five nominees for best new series, pitting 30 Rock against Studio 60 in a contest we can only assume was concocted purely for the guild members' amusement. [THR]
We hate to return so quickly to the Golden Globes nominations, but since we made a point of spotlighting Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip creator Aaron Sorkin's hope that a Globe nod would elevate his Little Serious-Minded Sketch Comedy Drama That Could from a "critical hit" into the type of hit that people actually watch, we thought it relevant to note that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association decided not to sprinkle its magic Nielsen dust on the series, granting a single nomination recognizing Sarah Paulson's performance as the proud Krazee Khristian who so glows with talent that her cast members can only gaze upon her through welding masks. We trust that Sorkin will handle this disappointment maturely, refraining from the petty impulse to have Matthew Perry and Brad Whitford hold forth at length about the meaninglessness of awards shows on a future episode, lambasting the "back-slapping, junket-whore buffet monkeys who wouldn't know quality programming if a DVD screener lodged itself next to the empty heads lodged in their asses" for abandoning his show in its hour of need.
With no Golden Globes story line as compelling as last year's tension over whether or not the Hollywood Foreign Press Association would pit Heath Ledger's mumble-mouthed rancher against Jake Gyllenhaal's dreamy-eyed-yet-mercurial cowpoke (or, more accurately, "sheep-poke") bottom, we suppose we'll have to settle for the one you're going to be reading about all day: the double nominations of Clint Eastwood in the directing category (for both of his World War II movies) and Leonardo DiCaprio's dual Best Actor nods for The Departed and Blood Diamond. For those so inclined, squeezing one's eyes shut and imagining the steamy Leo-on-Leo action of DiCaprio's Boston cop and South African smuggler wrestling over the gilded Globe statue while grunting in passable Southie and Afrikaner accents might fill the erotic void left by the celebrated gay cowboys. In other multiple nominations news, Helen Mirren was recognized for playing both Elizabeth I in a TV miniseries and Elizabeth II in The Queen, an achievement that we genuinely hope you won't use to concoct transgressive, cross-generational fantasies that sully the monarchy. Leave the queens alone, sicky.
With all the bongo-beating build-up to tomorrow morning's announcement of the Golden Globe movie nominations, it's easy to forget that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's annual awards ceremony also celebrates excellence in the Dramatic Televised Arts. And where Emmy voters are seemingly bound by conservative voting practices (or just can't be bothered to watch the screeners in the first place), the HFPA members are free to reward on merit alone, often taking it upon themselves to champion groundbreaking programming in its nascency. THR looks at the chances for some of this TV season's boldest new voices, including Aaron Sorkin's drama about the serious-minded people who make sketch comedy, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip:
· The mavericks of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle give their top honors—picture and directing—to Todd Fields' Little Children. Helen Mirren wins best actress for The Queen, a status quo concession they make up for by awarding Sacha Baron Cohen best actor for his Pamela Anderson-stalking work in Borat. Screenplay honors go to the hardboiled, Raymond-Chandler-meets-Degrassi indie, Brick. [SFFCC.org]
· Time's Richard Corliss gives us yet more insight into the shadowy goings on behind the closed doors of the New York Film Circle's annual gang bang ("The job is simple: tear yellow-lined paper into cracker-size bits; write a name or three on one piece; wait while the names are read out and tabulated," he writes, grippingly), and does some actual math to figure out if these lists actually predict Oscar results. Answer: Yes, they do! Occasionally. [Time.com]
· Clint vs. Clint. Leo vs. Leo. Peter vs. Peter. (Morgan: he wrote The Queen and Last King of Scotland.) In a bounty year of award-worthy output, will ceremonies like the Golden Globes (nominations out this Thursday) see multiple nods for single artists who did double-duty, or will vote-splitting end up cancelling them out? [LAT]
· Letters From Iwo Jima and United 93's strong showing in critics' polls puts the underhyped downer movies high on Academy members' radars; Ellen DeGeneres and her writers are already salivating at the hilarious opening montage sequence in which she single-handedly foils the plans of a group of 9-11 terrorists, only to jet-pack to the ground and find herself trapped in a Japanese internment camp. [Reuters]
At Defamer HQ, there is hardly an event more breathlessly anticipated than Miss Golden Globes Day, in which the Hollywood Foreign Press announces which teenage celebrity offspring will be plucked from relative obscurity, momentarily paraded on stage during their alcohol-drenched awards ceremony in an extravagant gown, and then immediately returned to a life of languishing in the shadow of their famous parents, left with little more than the fleeting sensory memory of the overpowering whiskey fumes rising off slurry presenter Harrison Ford. At a ceremony taking place earlier today, Lorraine Nicholson (the 16-year-old daughter of multiple Globe-winner Jack, should you not be familiar with her work), like every Miss Golden Globe that has come before her, emerged from a twenty-foot-tall, gilded vagina representing "Mother Hollywood" (modeled, legend has it, on the ladyparts of pioneering actress Mary Pickford), a powerfully symbolic entrance dramatizing the honoree's glorious rebirth into the show-business community. Please join us in recognizing young Nicholson on this special day, then in looking forward to the profoundly uncomfortable moment in which daughter and proud, scene-chewing Dad appear together onstage, when Jack will find himself unable to resist the temptation to tick off the names of each of Lorraine's predecessors with whom he's enjoyed a sexual relationship.
