There’s something fitting about the timing of Monday’s Golden Globes, two weeks ahead of the second inauguration of Donald Trump. The gaudiness, the scandals, the obeisance to corrupt foreign powers, the random bit players elevated to high office — and Hollywood’s willingness to shrug and play along with the madness here. That said, even amid an Attorney General’s probe into the legitimacy of the purchase (as I exclusively reported in November and which of course, was not covered in Variety, Deadline or THR), this ethics-challenged, anticipated-by-no-one awards show must go on. A quick recap for those who don’t live with this in their heads: Having purchased the Golden Globes, owners (pending review!) Todd Boehly and Jay Penske have created the perfect ironclad circle of conflict of interest. With the Globes, they now have financial stakes in:
Now that they’ve got their mitts on it, as previously reported here, they’ve been farming out the brand, creating a pair of completely preposterous spinoff awards events in Egypt and Turkey, countries where one can imagine the Penske-Boehly octopus might well have other interests this show can serve, like perhaps, courting investors, or a future buyer of the whole enterprise. (Do you think a private equity player like Boehly is in this for his deep love of cinema?) That all creates a curious position for their collection of journalistic assets — to have no clue what its parent company may or may not be involved in and certainly no freedom to report on whatever those might be. So if you’re the producer of an awards contender, does buying ads in a Penske publication help your shot at a nomination from the Globes? We don’t know that it does or doesn’t. The rules are on the site, of course, and they specify a voting body which includes the former HFPA members, but keeping the lines of church and state separate hasn’t exactly been a specialty of the Penske portfolio. If you have any question about how blurred the lines are, the fact that the Penske Big Three (Deadline, Variety, THR) have uniformly refused to so much as glance at the problems outlined above suggests the answer.
But are these awards phony, insomuch as any awards are at heart phony? In the awards sector, a place where such events as Carlos de Abreu’s Hollywood Film Awards prosper and flourish for years on end, there’s a pretty high bar for anything to be deemed “phony.” But the Globes still manages to limbo its way under even the de Abreu bar... Subscribe to The Ankler. to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of The Ankler. to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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