Golden goose eggs
Hollywood Foreign `Press' Association has problematic history, Jamie Portman writes.
In 1999, the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association received 82 gold watches — part of a promotional campaign on behalf of Sharon Stone's performance in The Muse. The HFPA ordered that the $400 watches be returned, deciding this was too extreme an attempt at bribery to be overlooked, but allowed members to hang onto the expensive cellphones they had also been sent. Stone was then rewarded with a Golden Globe nomination but not a win.
It was also around this time that the Fox studio incurred the HFPA'S wrath when it was unable to deliver Sandra Bullock for a news conference. The association retaliated by cancelling the much-sought-after tables traditionally reserved for Fox at the next Golden Globes dinner.
To thoughtful observers of the Hollywood scene, the HFPA and its members were already a joke 20 years ago — a tiny and pampered clique of freeloading parasites who would trade their votes for free food and drink or the chance to pose for a photo with a big star in order to impress the readers back home.
So has anything changed, despite repeated pledges by the Globers to clean up their act?
Not really, given the lavish treatment they recently received from Netflix and Paramount in connection with the TV series Emily in Paris. Thirty members were flown to Paris for a pre-pandemic set visit and expensively wined and dined at their $1,400-a-night hotel.
There is a cheering coda to this incident. Emily did manage to nail down a couple of Golden Globe nominations, to the accompaniment of a chorus of raspberries from critics, but it didn't win. It also suffered the indignity of being mocked during the ceremony.
The other good news is that this year's Golden Globes telecast was a bust, receiving such dismal ratings that NBC must surely be regretting the $60 million a year it is now contracted to hand over for the privilege of carrying the ceremony. Perhaps we must also thank COVID -19 for cutting this preposterous event down to size, although some entertainment value was again provided by the HFPA'S masochistic tendency to provide a platform to people all too ready to skewer its pretensions.
Hence this year, a glaring lack of Black nominees, not to mention the association's all-white membership, came to the fore with co-host Tina Fey, while certainly less lethal than Ricky Gervais was last year, not holding back. She found ammunition in Pixar's animated Soul, about a Black musician who's transformed into a cat. “The HFPA really responded to this movie because they do have five `cat' members,” she said wickedly.
So what about these “members” who hold such inflated power that they can turn key industry figures — studio bosses, network executives, talent agencies, even at times the media — into fawning supplicants? There were 87 of them at last count. They are ostensibly foreign-born journalists who write about Hollywood for outlets back home.
Yet over the years some have scarcely written anything at all, while others need full-time jobs in order to survive in Tinseltown.
It's questionable how many can accurately be called professionals.
As the Los Angeles Times recently revealed, the Golden Globes don't just mean big dollars for all aspects of an entertainment economy fuelled by the annual ceremony. More dubiously, they are a cash cow for the HFPA because of the amount of money this allegedly non-profit body pays to itself and various members. Los Angeles Times reporter Mark Harris has gone so far as to describe most Golden Globe voters as “indirectly compensated employees of NBC.”
Not flattering.
But far greater ethical lapses have been around for years. Emily Vanderwurff, a writer for the Vox website, was blunt in her indictment in 2016. The Golden Globes, she said, “can be bought. … Voted on by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the awards are famous for the lengths to which studios will go to woo the group's membership.”
The mainstream media views the HFPA with contempt, furious over the way studios fawn over an organization of questionable professional credentials. The Golden Globers, ever protective of their perks, respond with fury and paranoia.
But when it comes to indulging the HFPA, industry cynicism knows no bounds. A few years ago, mainstream film journalists attending a media event at a New York hotel found themselves sharing the floor with the pampered Golden Globe brigade. A pair of regular reporters were searching for the studio's regular hospitality suite, where an informal buffet table would offer cold cuts, salads and maybe a bowl of soup.
But they accidentally took a wrong turn, ending up at another suite with gleaming silverware and linen on the tables, gourmet food and French wine at the ready — and an elderly gentleman standing in the doorway brandishing a cane and screaming at them to leave. The sacred precincts of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association had been invaded, and an international incident was in the making until the interlopers beat a hasty retreat to a more proletarian snack of nachos and chips.
Two worlds were exposed that day. But there was further evidence of the HFPA'S skill with power politics. Some journalists had travelled a couple of thousand miles to talk to the film's star only to find themselves stood up. The official word was that a last-minute commitment elsewhere had made it impossible for him to get to Manhattan. Only later did it transpire that he was actually in the hotel that day for a top-secret news conference with HFPA membership. The studio was rewarded a few months later with a Golden Globe nomination for its star.