EXCEPT FOR THE Oscars the most important of these awards was the Golden Globes, where the members of the Foreign Press get to vote for their favorites. The Foreign Press numbers in the hundreds—several hundreds—but still a lot less than the thousands who vote on the Oscars themselves.
If these ceremonies had a saving grace it was that we always won best picture—always, that is, up and until the final vote, where we lost to Crash. But our long row of successes must have been very deflating to everyone who lost. To sit through so much tedium and so much bombast and then lose must be nearly intolerable. We were always given mike-accessible tables, with the Clooney table on one side of us and DreamWorks on the other. Both tables bore their lot stoically, but they did not shoot out waves of happiness. Rupert Murdoch was there—okay, he owns Fox, but still. Why go to anything so awful? Maybe his young wife actually enjoys this sort of thing; maybe the newness hasn’t worn off yet. Harvey Weinstein was there, and all the familar faces that in my judgment are easier to tolerate in the pages of Variety than when being crammed into an actual place. Jeffrey Katzenberg was more stoical than most. I reminded him of our Eddie Murphy picture and he had the grace to smile.