All that glitters is not Golden

BY the time I had cast my vote for next month’s Golden Globes last weekend, I felt like I had been in the trenches and through the wringer.

With so many movies dealing with rape, war, sexual addiction, contagion, revenge, slavery and betrayal, fiction and reality began to blur in my dreams. Oh, to have such high- class problems says you, but allow me to give you a flavour of what is known as Awards Season in Hollywood, when you have a vote.

Since the Toronto film festival in September, film makers and distributors have been rolling out their offerings for the Golden Globes, the Oscars and other awards first of all at a trickle and since November, in a cascade. Although I see movies all year long — on average about 300 per year — the thinking among marketing people appears to be that awards voters only tend to vote for movies they’ve recently seen and forget those from earlier in the year. I’m not sure that this is true in my case, (I still love Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Harry Potter from this summer, for example) but there’s no way of changing the system, so the deluge of movies keeps coming at you many times a day for about six weeks. As a Golden Globes voter, you are often the first to see and to vote for movies that most normal people have barely heard about, let alone seen.