All that glitters is not Golden
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.
As a journalist, it is often the most hectic time of the year, as editors want predictions and features for end of year editions, as well as the usual contributions.
In between conducting and writing interviews every day for the past few months, I have seen an average of two to three movies daily for the past six weeks, plus several television shows, all of which are clamouring for your awards attention. Without any grandiosity intended, one tries to take one’s vote very seriously, given the enormous career-changing exposure it can give to writers and film makers.
For some reason, much of what makes it through the long filtering process are often subjects that deal with the baser elements of humanity. This year, there were four movies all dealing with rape in war, three of them set in Bosnia and all made by women film makers, including Ireland’s Juanita Wilson’s excellent As If I’m Not There. The Chinese movie Flowers of War was another harrowing one. That’s without mentioning 9/11 or Shame.
This year again, many of the foreign movies dealt with gangs, violence, sexual harassment, sex trafficking, murder and death. Without in any way disrespecting the telling of these stories, I began to feel really depressed as the season wore on, consuming two or three such movies on a daily basis for weeks. One night this week, I was chased in my dreams by the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo wielding a knife!
Talking to one’s fellow voters, you find yourself asking if there’s any levity in anything they’ve gone through and secretly taking intense pleasure in animation as a break from many of the brutal situations which so many features deal with.
At the risk of trivialising important work done by say Michael Fassbender in Shame or Stephen Daldry in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, I cheered at the mordant humour of The Guard or the ecstatic trip which Harry Potter took its fan on one last time.
It’s funny and quite an honour to be part of the ecosystem in Hollywood which puts such a huge premium on nominations and awards and a long distance from the struggle which many non-established writers and film makers go through to tell their stories in the first place.
I look forward to seeing Brendan Gleeson, Brian Byrne, Sinead O’Connor and Michael Fassbender take their place on the red carpet in Beverly Hills on January 15, alongside all the other Hollywood luminaries.
Although it’s all glamour and gladrags, everyone is still working that night and hoping that getting there will lead to more work for the coming year. It is, after all, the business they call show.
