Golden Globes 2017: Will Hollywood be in the mood to party?
LOS ANGELES -- Is Hollywood in the mood to party?
On Sunday, the movie industry will gather for the Golden Globes, which are regularly one of the most freewheeling and frothiest award shows of the year. Champagne will flow. Punchlines will fly.
But the tone of this year’s ceremony may be different. The election of Donald Trump has loomed over this year’s awards season, where the movie industry’s usual self-congratulatory toasting has been mixed with a foreboding sense of dread.
“We are living in very troubled times,” Kenneth Lonergan, writer and director of one “Manchester by the Sea,” said Wednesday at the National Board of Review Awards. “How troubled, we don’t know yet. It’s going to be a lot of trouble, or it might be bad trouble like we’ve never seen.”
Such speeches have been commonplace throughout the litany of awards that lead up, ultimately, to the Feb. 26 Academy Awards.
At Tuesday’s New York Film Critics Circle Awards, “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah compared the lauded “O.J.: Made in America” to the election: “another bad decision based on fame and race.” At the Gotham Film Independent Film Awards in November, Damian Lewis archly intoned, “The film that receives the most votes ... is the winner. It’s a brilliant idea,” referring to Trump’s loss of the popular vote.
Barry Jenkins, the writer-director of the tender coming-of-age tale “Moonlight,” said at the National Board of Review Awards: “As we make America great again, let’s remember some inconsiderable things in our legacy, because there was a time when someone like me was just not considered.”
And surely many attendees will be thinking of those absent. After a year full of notable deaths, the back-to-back passing over the holidays of Debbie Reynolds and her daughter Carrie Fisher, was felt particularly in a Hollywood that revered them both. Reynolds and Fisher were to be laid to rest Friday in Los Angeles.
Sunday night’s biggest question may between whether to let loose or sober up.