Brief week: Even though the Golden Globes are a joke, the audience keeps coming | Emma Brooks

Monday

The truest thing ever said about the Golden Globes was said by Tina Fey when she hosted the awards ceremony in 2019 and described the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a hacker group, as operating out of “the back cabin of a French McDonald’s.” The HFPA disbanded in 2023 after allegations of racism, but 95 former members retained voting rights and the show continued on Monday.

And what a year it was for the second Penske Media Golden Globe Awards, which featured not only a merchandising tie-in with betting tool Polymarket (“integrated brand and real-time market insights designed to enhance audience engagement”) but also a new category for Best Relationship with Screen, and Best Podcast. Facing stiff competition from Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy and The Mel Robbins Podcast, the award went to Amy Poehler’s Good Hang, a show she shares with her friends to remind us how important Tina Fey is to their partnership.

Meanwhile, at the TV awards, there was well-deserved recognition for actor and thought leader Stephen Graham, for Adolescent, his Netflix show that explores the complexities of men’s rights, and I was pleased that HBO’s The Pitt won best drama, although you still need a VPN to watch it in Britain. (I was also happy that Michelle Williams won for Dying for Sex, an underrated FX show that wasn’t helped by its terrible title.)

The only thing that struck me was when the camera panned into the audience during comedian Nikki Glaser’s sweet opening monologue: Is there any circumstance on earth that would make these people completely skip this thing? The HFPA was a joke, and the awards then and now are a joke, but short of some sort of Bombay-esque event that reduces red carpet nominees to ashes, we have to assume they’ll continue to show up in their finery. I know, I know; It’s about to the job.

Tuesday

It used to be the simple practice in New York to say you saw Hamilton when he was on public display (I didn’t see him on public display). The latest version of this is to claim that you saw Oh, Mary!, the hit Broadway show that recently transferred to London, when it opened downtown at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. (I didn’t see it at the Lucille Lortel Hotel. In fact, I don’t think I saw anything at all before others saw it and told me to leave.)

But I saw, Mary! This week at the Trafalgar Theater in the West End, and it made me so glad I got off the Tube at the wrong stop on my way home. Cole Escola’s starring role as a depressed, alcoholic former cabaret star, Mary Todd Lincoln, is reprized by Mason Alexander Park and any concern that we’ve missed the only version worth watching evaporates in the first five minutes.

Not everyone feels this way. Escola tells the story of down-on-his-luck folk from New Jersey who show up in a Broadway production expecting a bleak connection to American history rather than a series of jokes about Abraham Lincoln being gay, and then walk out five minutes later. I don’t know if this has happened in London yet.

But while the show is sold out here, there’s no doubt, Mary! It didn’t have the same effect as it had in New York, perhaps, partly because the American history part is disgusting, and partly because London is, in my opinion, a much more upright city. I’ve heard more than one puzzled or disapproving reaction from Londoners who might have been happier in a Michael Jackson musical or Wicked. How do I feel about Mary! The kind of combat protection that makes me think if you don’t like it, it wasn’t for you in the first place.

Wednesday

If it’s funny to show up at the Golden Globes, how would you like to show up at the AARP Adult Film Awards — no stage is too obscure, no appearance too lowly as long as there are cameras to record it — former leading man George Clooney. It’s quite a development, isn’t it, as Noah Wyle, the ER maid of honor at the time, leapfrogged Clooney with his role in The Pitt, while Clooney turned to melancholy in heavy films directed by Greta Gerwig’s heartbroken husband, Noah Baumbach.

Anyway, at least someone at AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons) was a fan of Jay Kelly, and this week Clooney appeared on stage to accept an award for him, during which he defended Paul Dano over something Quentin Tarantino said… Oh, I can’t even bring myself to get into this.

What interests me is the AARP itself, an organization with enormous, if invisible, cultural reach in the United States. Like Costco Magazine (circulation: 15.4 million), the print arm of AARP is one of the few behemoth media organizations that isn’t slowly circling the drain. It’s a giant brand with 38 million members in the United States, the highest circulation of any print media in the country, and its reader base, at least in part, of people with money. I’m getting everything back. Smart move by Clooney

Thursday

Obviously I wouldn’t take a child to see Oh, Mary!, but I would also hesitate to take anyone under 15 to see Sondheim. However, clever programming at the Barbican means I might do just that. News this week of an upcoming production of Sunday in the Park with George featuring Wicked co-stars Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey is a clever program for the theater’s 2027 season that will be more difficult to come by than tickets to Kenneth Branagh’s The Tempest at the RSC.

I have a soft spot for Grande after being forced to sit in a room for what seemed like decades while Sam and Cat played in the background. But even the former Nickelodeon star’s appeal won’t diminish the importance of this tough sell. Sondheim is long, and to get my kids out of the house I’m going to have to lie about my running time, again, despite poor results in that area. I told my kids that Mincemeat was only 80 minutes long, and by the end of the three-hour production on a school night, there were some really weird faces.

Friday

It’s great to read about Alan Rickman in all the tributes gathered by The Guardian this week to mark the tenth anniversary of his death. It brought me back to his memoirs, one of the great reading experiences, in which Rickman is waspish, disaffected, and really, really wonderfully grouchy, and warmly entertaining. One anecdote that stuck with me: After attending a Guardian party in the late 1990s, Rickman remarked that even for an actor used to this kind of thing, he had never seen a group of people so drunk and uncontrollably chaotic. Proud, yes, surprised, no.