All of the Golden Globe winners were box office flops.
Spinning the Golden Globes
By Don Feder
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 23, 2006
It would be difficult to pick the most sickening spectacle at last week’s Golden Globe Awards – George Cloony making an obscene joke about convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s name, Jewish actress Sara Jessica Parker nearly swooning as she announced the award for the pro-jihad Palestinian (I know, that’s redundant) film Paradise Now, or Geena Davis inventing a cutsy-poo story about the little girl who tugged at Davis’ dress and said she was the reason the child wanted to become president.
Truly, there were so many Maalox moments at the 63rd annual Golden Globe Awards that it’s hard to choose the most stomach-churning.
Above all, the Golden Globes were trenchantly political: Hollywood strutting its leftist stuff. This year’s awards represented another triumph of politics over art.
* Cloony (who once joked about Charleton Heston’s Alzheimers) copped a "Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture" for Syriana, a paranoid fantasy about a plot by oil companies to redraw the map of the Middle East to maximize their profits. It even contains a sympathetic portrait of a suicide bomber.
* Rachel Weisz won "Best Supporting Actress" for the environmentally correct action flick The Constant Gardener. The villain is a pharmaceutical firm. (Now that’s original!) All of Africa’s problems are attributed to evil, Caucasian corporate types, thus exonerating the continent’s bloody military regimes. There’s even product placement for Amnesty International and Oxfam.
* "Best Foreign Language Film" (alluded to earlier) – direct from Arifatistan, Paradise Now. Writing in The Jerusalem Post, the ever-prescient Caroline Glick notes the film "glorifies the mass murder of Jews in Israel." It was just a matter of time before Hollywood’s self-loathing Jews got around to hating Israel.
* Mary Louise Parker – who starred in the Showtime mini-series "Weeds," which celebrated suburban drug-pushing – won "Best Actress in a Comedy Series" in the television category. Sadly, Robert Downey Jr. (who’s probably back in rehab) wasn’t available to present the award.
* Geena Davis, who plays a Hillary-clone who becomes America’s first female president, won "Best Actress In A TV Drama Series." "Commander In Chief" could have been produced by Rob Reiner. Conservatives are portrayed as warmongers, hate-mongers and fanatics. Davis’ foil, House Speaker Nathan Templeton (portrayed by longtime Hollywood leftist Donald Sutherland), is a cynical, power-mad, Christian conservative. The New Republic notes, "The show’s partisan bias is comically unsubtle."
* The critic for The Boston Herald had an orgasmic experience over the prominence of Hollywood’s favorite minority. "If the Golden Globe awards predict the Oscars, the Academy Awards had better get ready for gay America," the critic chortled. Three homosexual-themed movies – Brokeback Mountain (one of the evening’s two big winners), Transamerica, and Capote – all were honored. If the gay cowboys of Brokeback wore pantyhose and smoked pot, while recruiting for the Sierra Club and pushing a Palestinian state – it would have won in every category, by unanimous consent.
All of the Golden Globe winners were box office flops. Before the ceremony, Brokeback (The Marlboro Man meets The Bird Cage) had earned an anemic $36 million – compared to $587 million for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, released at about the same time.
None of the agit-prop epics beloved of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (which picks the Golden Globes) made it into the top 50 box-office grossers. Two barely made it in the top 100 – The Constant Gardener (#74) and Syriana (#91). I’m not counting Walk The Line, which was apolitical.
The Sisterhood of The Traveling Pants, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, and Kung Fu Hustle all were more popular with moviegoers than Brokeback Mountain (#102).
Hollywood would rather make a message movie ("Please hold the line for Michael Moore") that loses money, than a smash hit that touts faith, family, or America. The entertainment industry so-called loves to sneer at popular tastes and actually takes pride in honoring films the public pans.
The Passion of Christ (worldwide gross in the first year after release: $610 million) was roundly snubbed when the industry handed out its 2004 honors. It ended up with one minor Oscar – I believe for "Best Film in Aramaic."
The Hollywood sign should be decorated with a hammer and sickle on one end and a Muslim crescent on the other. The industry is dogmatically political – anti-American, revisionist (witness its latest paean to the noble savage The New World), religion-adverse (The Da Vinci Code in theaters May 19th) and into moral relevancy (Munich).
Even at the "Golden Globes," Cloony and company didn’t let it all hang out.
If you’d like to know what Hollywood’s really thinking, consider a full-page ad in The New York Times of December 2, 2005 ("The World Can’t Wait: Drive Out The Bush Regime").
Times’ readers were told that their government "is waging a murderous and utterly illegitimate war in Iraq," "is openly torturing people," "is moving each day closer to a theocracy, where a narrow and hateful brand of Christian fundamentalism will rule," and "enforces a culture of greed, bigotry, intolerance and ignorance." Then came the coup de smear: "People look at this and think of Hitler – and they are right to do so."
Along with the Islamic Association of America, Queers for Economic Justice and the Stalinist National Lawyers Guild, signers included some of the more openly leftist denizens of Bel Air: Ed Asner, Ed Begley, Jr., Gabriel Byrne, Jane Fonda, Margot Kidder, and Martin Sheen.
If they had the guts, 90 percent membership of the Screen Actors Guild would have signed on. Is it so surprising that these creatures go gaga for films like Syriana, The Constant Gardener, and Brokeback Mountain?
Think I’ll skip the Oscars and watch Gods And Generals on DVD. |
