Sending Flowers to Myself...

...on the occasion of the first birthday of this blog. All the pleasures of infancy without any of the teething rings or the ear infections. Though it occurs to me I am still up at odd hours with this thing. Anyway, thanks for continuing to read!

That first day of blogging was occasioned by last year's Golden Globe Awards, most memorable to me now as the occasion when bogus winner Leonardo DiCaprio implored audiences to "keep giving help to the tsunami." Even without a year's distance, I can't say I have much to add about this year's Golden Globes, either. For the third year running, I'm almost totally unmoved by this year's crop of major awards contenders. At least in 2003 I could make a personal obsession and enormous mea culpa out of Charlize Theron's Monster performance, and nearly alone among my friends, I really admired Million Dollar Baby last year. Almost all of this year's front-runners are more palatable to me in concept than in point of fact, to say nothing of straightforward mediocrities like Walk the Line and Match Point. This year's ceremony, which I only observed as a sort of corner-of-my-eye affair on Derek's roommate's tiny TV—featuring the kind of reception that a cheap antenna in Queens is likely to buy you—reminded me of the movies it honored: polished, unembarrassing, but unremarkable beneath a pleasing, gleaming surface.

It is symptomatic of my dyspepsia about this year's awards season that all of my favorite Globes moments came from the TV actors. Two of them came from Geena Davis alone: reminding us what a knockout she often managed to be at these kinds of affairs, especially in bright red, and hooking the whole audience with that hilarious bit of apocrypha in her acceptance speech. It suddenly didn't matter that the two episodes of Commander in Chief I have seen have been so tepid and milky, not least because the writers seem so scared of fully realizing Davis' character and because she hasn't done much to raise the game of her own accord. I loved when Sandra Oh, looking like a million bucks for the second year running, described the nervous rush of the winning instant—"I feel like someone just set me on fire!"—and I loved that S. Epatha Merkerson, virtually alone among repeat Globe- and Emmy-winners (or Globe- and Oscar-winners) managed to give two distinct speeches that were both funny, warm, and sincere: "I am 53 years old, and this was my first lead in a film," she semi-tearfully confessed, before adding, "and if I weren't in the middle of a major hot flash, I would have something to say about that." Merkerson also had, in Jesse L. Martin, the dreamiest date of the evening.

No real fashion praisesongs to deliver, though Eric Bana and Viggo Mortensen sure cleaned up good, and Maria Bello, Felicity Huffman, and Kate Beckinsale stole Uma Thurman's good idea from last year in brilliant white. (Beckinsale's only worked, though, when she ditched the ridiculous fur wrap.)