Well, he did it. That irascible rascal Ricky Gervais once again kicked off a Golden Globes ceremony with a scalding rebuke of the glittery celebrity culture that everyone was there (and at home) to revel in. Only, was it actually that scalding? This was Gervais’s fifth outing as Globes host, and his shtick felt a little tired, stodgy and cranky instead of righteously iconoclastic. Maybe that’s due to the real-world tension and horror surrounding the ceremony—escalation of U.S. aggression toward Iran, wildfires consuming Australia. Surely dire times necessitate some needling of our more frivolous enjoyments, but not when it seems as self-serving as Gervais’s.
Perhaps the real reason Gervais’s opening monologue landed with a groan is that his brand of “it’s all pretty stupid, innit?” jabs has lost its bite the more and more he positions himself deliberately to make them, whether by insisting himself into Twitter spats or, y’know, agreeing to host the Golden Globes. “I don’t care,” Gervais kept saying during his monologue. Yet, clearly he must. Otherwise, why show up?
There were a few intriguingly targeted jokes in his set—particularly his reminder that companies, like Amazon and Apple, that employ many of the nominees in the room have also been accused of exploitative labor practices. Only, Gervais wasn’t really doing some complicated musing on the myriad compromises of the wealth bubble and what they might mean in the grand schematic of life on Earth. Rather, he seemed simply annoyed about stars getting political in their speeches because he didn’t want to hear them. It was more an eye roll than it was an attempt at salience, less Gervais telling actors to put their money where their mouths are than it was petty point-scoring. (Arguably, Joaquin Phoenix better articulated the gap between speech and action later in the evening.)
I guess in that way, Gervais, accidentally or not, got at the chafe of things as they are now: what good is all this fun nothing when there is all the awful, pressing everything to attend to? It’s unlikely that any one awards ceremony will ever answer that question, but Gervais’s inelegant prodding—complete with smug smirks and tired bits that felt held over from 2016—at least kicked the dirt a little. The monologue was mostly a flop, but it still started the evening with an interesting itch.
Poor Jennifer Aniston, who had to come out immediately after being essentially subtweeted for working for Apple and then deliver a political speech (which Ricky said weren’t allowed!) on behalf of The Loudest Voice winner Russell Crowe, who was in Australia dealing with the fires. That had to be a pretty grueling few minutes for Aniston, who—like so many others in the room—was just trying to enjoy her evening in the glow of a year’s success. Does that mean she and others shouldn’t be called out for their connections to bad things? No, not really, but it’s still uncomfortable to watch. Probably most things should be uncomfortable at this point, and yet here we are anyway, wanting to swim in all the champagne fizz for a few hours—either as a brief respite before retaking the fight, or as yet another easy distraction.
The special awards are usually when winners feel more encouraged (and emboldened by a stopping of the speech clock) to go deeper, but the evening’s first recipient, Ellen DeGeneres, kept things safely sentimental. She spoke about the power of television—to entertain, to inspire, to offer a feeling of communion between isolated people—and made a few light jokes about actually having a husband and children. (In so doing, forgetting to thank her wife, Portia di Rossi.) I don’t think anyone expected DeGeneres to venture too far into the weeds of politics; that’s really not her thing. But maybe she could have at least made a joke about being pals with George W. Bush? Eh, that was never going to happen.