Director Chloé Zhao, in her speech after receiving the award for best drama at the Golden Globes for 'Nomadland.' NBC / AP
For the past two weeks, members of the HFPA, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, no more than 90 privileged ones that big production companies pamper by handing out the Golden Globes, have been coming under fire for their rampant corruption.
Nothing new under the sun: neither by how they decide the nominations after gifts from the companies nor by the press reports.
A couple of seasons ago they were already the object of public derision and did the "teeth, teeth, which is what pisses them off" so common in Spain: endure the pull and continue with their business.
In this edition, the 78th (how long the joke lasts!), Everything seemed to follow the same course, until the hook arrived that made them stagger: they haven't had a black journalist since 2003. And in the
showbusiness
actual that is a major sin.
You can put up with jokes about your amorality, and as much as its current president is Turkish and the previous Indian, there was a problem.
The Golden Globes: Hollywood's Big Zoom Reunion
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So the organizers have run.
And how.
Although it is true - it must be recognized - that its delivery people have always been an example of ethnic amalgam, this year in the cinema section HFPA journalists have been contrite and have prioritized ethnicity over merit.
And the cases of Andra Day and Chadwick Boseman confirm it.
Nomadland's
best drama award is open to
dispute.
The winner of the Golden Lion of the last Venice festival is a simple film that is not simple: with apparent simplicity it illustrates the life of an ordinary woman who has suffered a vital cataclysm like so many curritos of the middle class: she was a teacher in a city created around from a plasterboard factory.
A financial crisis ends the industry.
And the teacher enters the stream of temporary workers who roam her country in search of precarious jobs, like the one offered by Amazon at Christmas time.
It is the new working class, that breeding ground that ceased to be the basis of the Democratic Party to promote Trump.
But
Nomadland is
not about that: it only portrays.
With as much coldness as affection.
And Frances MacDormand confirms that she is the perfect face for that deep America (she already did it in
Three Ads on the Outskirts).
Chloé Zhao, who has already shot her new film, the mega-production
The Eternals,
repeats the trick of her previous work,
The Rider: it
seems a light work, but hides an enormous dramatic power.
Zhao is the second filmmaker to win the Globe for best director (after Barbra Streisand for
Yentl
, and it was in 1983).
At the end of her last speech, its creator defined
Nomadland
as "a journey through grief."
Frances McDormand, in 'Nomadland'.
In the video, the trailer for the film.
And here the trade-offs have begun: that Andra Day is the best dramatic actress for her Billie Holiday (okay, just okay) in the stupid
United States against Billie Holiday
seemed like a joke by Joaquin Phoenix, who delivered the award.
Well, no, it was true, and thus they deprived McDormand, who had not even been connected by video call, of his deserved recognition.
The same has happened with Chadwick Boseman, posthumous award for dramatic actor for
The Mother of the Blues.
The other four rivals in its category have made a better approach, exploration and representation of their characters.
Anthony Hopkins
(The Father),
Riz Ahmed
(Sound of Metal),
Tahar Rahim
(The Mauritanian)
and Gary Oldman
(Mank).
.. what interpretations.
The award was glimpsed with the video of children that the only thing they knew about cinema was Boseman.
Other strange decisions have not been so painful: good for Sacha Baron Cohen as a comedy actor with
Borat, a film
sequel
(come on,
Borat 2
);
and incidentally he does double as director and producer of the best comedy of the season.
He likes to walk on the wire, he is always on the edge of falling into the abyss, one day someone may actually
kill
him
, but until then he is the jester who yells at us that the emperor is naked.
Instead, her on-screen daughter, Maria Bakalova, has had the Globe stolen and given to Rosamund Pike for
I Care A Lot.
I can imagine the reasoning of the HFPA voter: who am I going to run into more times in the next few years, Bakalova or Pike?
Sacha Baron Cohen, in 'Borat 2'.
In the video, trailer of the film.
In the secondary schools, Amanda Seyfried
(Mank),
who was the favorite, loses to Jodie Foster
(The Mauritanian),
who also embroiders it.
This stumbles Seyfried's hitherto flawless run to the Oscar.
And in the secondary, David Kaluuya
(Judas and the black messiah)
also overtakes Leslie Odom Jr., favorite with his Sam Cooke from
One Night in Miami.
By the way, Odom also acts in the two non-movies of the night, which provoked great previous debates:
Hamilton
(because it is a musical recorded in his theater performances; yes, what a musical!) And
Music
(why call that movie ...).
Among the rest, two final details: best script for Aaron Sorkin for
The Trial of the 7 in Chicago,
one of those films based on the verb as only Sorkin can write (for another day there is a debate on whether he knows how to direct them);
and the botch of giving
Minari
, a 100% American film, the award for best foreign-language film.
In truth, it is true: more than 50% is in the Korean in which the main family speaks, which, however, lives in Arkansas, United States.
The same thing happened with
Clint Eastwood's
Letters from Iwo Jima
.
If English is the native language of the United States, what if the film is in Coyotero Apache, Navajo, or Jicarilla?