Tarnished Globes

Forget the winners — tonight's Golden Globe awards press conference was awful. Between Mary Hart's lame commentary, and all the other entertainment show hosts trying to one-up each other, the press conference itself sucked. And the TV coverage? Even worse. NBC didn't even show the press conference live, relying on Billy Bush and Nancy O'Dell to announce the winners in their own mock press conference that trailed the real thing — thus rendering it instantly behind-the-curve and irrelevant. E! showed the press conference, but cut away every now and then to reaction from Ryan Seacrest and other folks in the E! studios. And the sound on CNN kept going out of synch, no doubt because Larry King kept making completely stupid comments after each announcement about how one movie or another was great or one of the year's best. (Of course they are, Larry. Why do you think they're nominated?) And the worst thing of all was when Johnny Depp won for best actor in a film, musical or comedy, and Larry King said something about how it was wrong that Daniel Day-Lewis wasn't nominated. Duh. He was nominated — in the category of best actor in a film, drama. (And he won for it, too.) But because CNN was the only network of the three that actually showed the press conference as it unfolded, without interruption, I stuck with CNN. And by 9:30, a half hour after it began, the whole thing was over. At that point, NBC was still half-way through making their announcements and discussing the winners. Oh, and did Billy Bush really dismiss Cate Blanchett's award-winning performance in I'm Not There by saying, "At the end of the day it's a woman imitating a man?" That guy has no business being an entertainment journalist. He's lame. NBC's coverage was lame. The whole thing was lame. And it wasn't even disappointing. Rather, as a film fan, a television fan, and a film awards show fan, it just made me angry. I really really hope this writers strike ends ASAP so we can get back our TV shows and the Oscars can go on as they should be going on, not like this awful attempt at television.