The Golden Globules

2012 is getting off to a dismally slow start. The Republicunts and Democraps are on an endless, repetitive loop; a cruise ship runs aground onto a sand bar and the media starts squawking about the Titanic (the Hollywood treatment is already in the works: The Love Death Boat); and awards season is well on its way to using up any spare oxygen left in Los Angeles. I started to watch the Golden Globules to see Ricky Gervais be a prick, like everyone else, but it was so wrist-hackingly dull I immediately reached for my Twilight: Breaking Dawn electric hair-straightener, wrapped the cord around my neck, hung it on a door knob, and attempted either autoerotic asphyxiation or suicide, whichever came first. As I beat off and gurgled, the remote in my other hand, I kept inadvertently switching back to the Globes, each time seeing something so egregious that it made me hope I’d pull a David Caradine or Michael Hutchence before achieving orgasm to end the pain. It was very A Clockwork Orange meets Ken Park.

I propose that female stars should start getting their Hollywood wardrobe mistresses to make their frocks again, because misogynist fashion designers have obviously lost the plot. Either that or the stylists to the stars are serious sadists. I haven’t seen a more grotesque parade of cheesy prom dresses since Carrie. If one of them had had the creativity to drench herself in pig’s blood (not even you, Tilda?), I’d have been impressed.

Flipping back and forth between the same dull shot of the capsized cruise ship, pompous Piers Morgan interviewing that smug slug Snoot Gingrich, and this meaningless, meandering awards show, I kept hearing snippets of dialogue that made me think I might be watching a rerun of Glee. Madonna, a piece of gristle in a ball gown (hey, I’m just using the word her own ex-husband used to describe her!), noticeably bereft of a hydrangea corsage, asked if Elton John was wearing a dress and called Ricky Gervais a girl: a mean cheerleader taunting two fat kids. You can take the girl out of Bay City, Michigan High School, but you can’t take Bay City, Michigan High School out of the girl. That’s what Hollywood always reminds me of these days: a simulacrum of my high school. The popular town kids, whose fathers had the most money, sat around at the designated tables in the cafeteria and congratulated one another on the new cars they’d received for their birthdays, while the children of the corn, the lumpenproletariat, peered at them from the periphery, sneezing into their baloney sandwiches, secretly hating them. Did I actually hear that the stars at the Globes were dining on a chocolate dessert sprinkled with real flakes of gold, or was I having an aural hallucination owing to the lack of oxygen to my brain? Oh well, let them eat golden cake, and then shit gold bars for all I care. I’m going to die in a closet hanging from my neck furiously jerking off, like in a Larry Clark movie. Now that’s glamorous.

Flip. There’s old Hanoi Jane, back in the lap of the Hollywood establishment. She still looks better than half the women a quarter her age, but I guess the radical politics got cosmetically plastered over during the last few decades of plastic surgery. Where are Vanessa Redgrave and the P.L.O. when you need them? Couldn’t someone just even mutter something vaguely political under his breath after having sloshed back a few stiff cocktails? One lame joke by Gervais, who was obviously on a short leash, about the recession at the very end of the broadcast? I guess his obscenely exorbitant salary made it a bit awkward for him to skewer the invited guests for being so flagrantly pre-French Revolution.  And honestly, does everybody in every category have to show up now? Is it contractually stipulated? Couldn’t just one of them have been obliged to stay home with a head cold? Don’t flu and awards seasons correspond? Gone are the days when titans of cinema like Marlon Brando and George C. Scott refused Academy Awards and nominations, and half the nominees couldn’t even be bothered to show up. Everyone’s a player now, addicted to adulation. Hey, there are people in the Midwest who don’t even have one Golden Globe!

I really much preferred the old Hollywood studio system, when movie stars were forced to live on the film lot, almost like slaves, provided with uppers and downers to keep up their productivity, and basically kept and fed like very expensive, extremely talented veal. After their usefulness had been exhausted, they were let go from their contracts, many of them eventually going mad, killing themselves or each other, and dying in poverty and obscurity. All in all, a sound and just system.

Sadly, I came before I expired, so I just spent the rest of the evening deleting old photographs from my iPhone to make room for my upcoming trips to Cuba and Europe. Next week: my iPhone camera greatest hits.