Golden Globes Recap (2012)

Ricky Gervais hosts the Golden Globes... again

 

So, the 2012 Golden Globes were last night, and they were certainly interesting! We had a return to Ricky Gervais's... unique sense of humor, several well-deserved awards, and then some styles that were, for lack of a better word, interesting. But what we're here to talk about are the awards -- and what they mean for the race to the Oscars that starts today.


Let's begin with a quick recap of the television awards. I didn't really care about the majority of these, except for Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress. The best part about that was that both of my picks won their respective categories -- Peter Dinklage, who portrays the Imp, Tyrion Lannister, on Game of Thrones, won Best Supporting Actor, and Jessica Lange, the creepy neighbor Constance on American Horror Story, won Best Supporting Actress. I was also happy to see Downton Abbey and Kate Winslet pick up awards, and Glee losing Best Comedy Series to Modern Family was worth it for the hilarious acceptance speech.

Let's talk first about the Best Actress awards. The award for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy was pretty much sewn up for Michelle Williams, and she was glorious in her acceptance speech. The real test was the Best Actress in a Drama Award. Of course, everyone's automatic guess was Meryl Streep for her performance as Margaret Thatcher in Iron Lady -- but with a field of nominees that included The Help's Viola Davis, We Need To Talk About Kevin's Tilda Swinton, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo's Rooney Mara, and Albert Nobbs' Glenn Close, you could never be sure.

Luckily, though, Meryl pulled through and ended up bringing home the gold. Which means that the race for the Oscar is now squarely between Williams and Streep -- no other actress on the list really poses any competition.

Secondly, the Best Picture race has also been narrowed down. Though The Help and Hugo still pose a threat -- after all, The Help racked up acting nominations like nobody's business and Martin Scorsese walked away with the Best Director award for the adventure film that revolutionized the world of 3D -- the biggest competitors for that honor were made clear last night. Michel Hazanavicius' silent film The Artist was one, and the other was The Descendants, directed by Alexander Payne and starring George Clooney.

The acceptance speeches of the night were pretty awesome, too. Some notable ones that you should look up on YouTube include: Morgan Freeman's Cecil B. DeMille speech, Meryl Streep's admirably humble speech for her Iron Lady win, Michelle Williams' stunningly simple speech for her My Week With Marilyn victory, and then Sofia Vergara's Spanish commentary during the Modern Family Best Comedy Series acceptance speech.

So, to wrap-up, it was a very defining night for the awards race, and it also ended up being a very fun one thanks to Ricky Gervais, Helen Mirren, Colin Firth, and lots of other people. Also, they showed Natalie Portman a lot, even though she wasn't nominated for anything, so I'm not really complaining.