The Golden Globes are over.
A folksy looking and sounding Jeff Bridges (above, in Crazy Heart), not George Clooney (for Up in the Air), got the chance to thank family (including father Lloyd Bridges and his mother, who died last year), friends, and co-workers. Although Bridges' win wasn't a total surprise, many of us were expecting George Clooney, who looks more like the type of guy the Hollywood Foreign Press Association would go for.
After all, they chose Sandra Bullock for the box-office hit The Blind Side, Meryl Streep for the box-office hit Julie & Julia, and Robert Downey Jr for the box-office hit Sherlock Holmes. Crazy Heart, a drama about an aging country singer, has grossed about 1/1000th of what those movies made. Up in the Air, though hardly a gigantic hit, is doing quite well at the box office, and as I said before, George Clooney is, well, George Clooney.
The real big surprise of the evening, however, was James Cameron's win. Again, that wasn't a total surprise, mind you, but I believe that most people (including winner Cameron) were expecting to hear the name of The Hurt Locker's Kathryn Bigelow despite her movie's meager $12 million at the domestic box office. She'd have been a female best director winner (the second one, after Barbra Streisand), and it'd have shown that HFPA members are almost like movie critics in their discerning taste.
To hell with critical acclaim, the HFPA voters finally decided. And that's how critics favorite Bigelow was bypassed in favor of audience favorite Cameron. Having just passed George Lucas' Star Wars, Avatar is well on its way to becoming the #2 — perhaps even the #1 — all-time hit at the domestic box office (not adjusted for inflation, etc. etc.). And speaking of audience favorites, The Hangover won as the best comedy or musical of 2009.
Apart from Crazy Heart, which also won for best song (T Bone's "The Weary Kind"), non-blockbusters had to content themselves with the Honor of Being Nominated. The Hurt Locker, in fact, didn't win a single Golden Globe. Neither did Nine.
We at Alt Film Guide got only three of our movie predictions wrong: best director, actor (drama), and film (comedy or musical). Personally, except for Jeff Bridges' win, I think that our choices were right and those of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association were the ones that were dead wrong.
Photo: Crazy Heart (Lorey Sebastian / 20th Century Fox); Avatar (ILM / 20th Century Fox)