Monday
The truest thing ever said about the Golden Globes was by Tina Fey when she hosted the awards in 2019 and described the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a group of junket hacks, as operating out of the “back booth of a French McDonalds”. The HFPA was disbanded in 2023 after allegations of racism, but 95 former members retained voting rights and on Monday, the show went on.
And what a year it was for the second Penske Media Golden Globe awards, featuring not only a commercial tie-in with the betting tool Polymarket (“integrated branding and real-time market insights designed to enhance audience engagement”) but a new category for poor-relation-to-the-screen, best podcast. Against 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 in which she yuks it up with her friends to remind us how important Tina Fey was in their partnership.
In the TV awards, meanwhile, there was well-earned recognition for the actor and thought leader Stephen Graham, for Adolescence, his Netflix show exploring the complexities of men’s rights, and I was happy HBO’s The Pitt won best drama, even though you still need a VPN to watch it in Britain. (I was also happy Michelle Williams won for Dying for Sex, a hugely under-rated FX show that wasn’t helped by its terrible title.)
One thing that struck me as the camera swept over the audience during standup comedian Nikki Glaser’s affable opening monologue: is there any circumstance on Earth that would make these people skip this thing entirely? The HFPA was a joke, the awards then and now are a joke, but short of some kind of Pompeii-like event reducing nominees on the red carpet to ash, we have to assume they’ll keep turning up in their finery. I know, I know; it’s about the work.
Tuesday
A low-key flex in New York used to be to say you saw Hamilton when it was on at the Public (I didn’t see it at the Public). The newest version of this is to claim 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. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything before everyone else saw it and told me to go.)
I did, however, see Oh, Mary! this week at the Trafalgar theatre in the West End and it made me so happy I got off the tube at the wrong stop on the way home. Cole Escola’s starring role as a depressed, alcoholic, former cabaret star, Mary Todd Lincoln, is reprised by Mason Alexander Park and any concern that we’d missed the only version worth seeing evaporates in the first five minutes.
Not everyone feels this way. Escola tells the story of hapless folk from New Jersey showing up to the Broadway production anticipating a sombre engagement with American history rather than a series of jokes about Abraham Lincoln being gay, and huffing out after five minutes. I don’t know if that has happened in London yet.
But while the show here is sold out, there’s no question Oh, Mary! hasn’t had the same impact that it had in New York, partly, perhaps, because the American history part is off-putting and partly because London, in my view, is a much straighter town. I have heard more than one puzzled or disapproving reaction from Londoners who might have been happier at the Michael Jackson musical or Wicked. On which score I feel towards Oh, Mary! a certain combative protectiveness that makes me think if you didn’t like it, it wasn’t for you in the first place.
Nigel Farage: ‘Look, I can’t be a vampire, I’ve got a shadow.’ Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The GuardianWednesday
If it’s risible to show up at the Golden Globes, how do you like AARP’s Movies for Grownups awards featuring – no stage too obscure, no appearance too lowly as long as there are cameras to record it – the former leading man George Clooney. It’s quite the turn up, isn’t it, that Noah Wyle, ever the bridesmaid on ER back in the day, has leapt over Clooney with his role in The Pitt, while Clooney is reduced to moping about in ponderous films by Greta Gerwig’s sad-looking husband, Noah Baumbach.
Anyway at least someone at AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons) liked Jay Kelly and this week Clooney showed up on stage to collect an award for it, during the course of which he defended Paul Dano from something Quentin Tarantino had said about … Oh, I can’t even bring myself to get into this.
What interests me is the AARP itself, an organisation of immense if invisible cultural reach in the US. Like Costco magazine (circulation: 15.4m), AARP’s publications arm is one of the few juggernaut media enterprises that isn’t slowly circling the drain. It is a behemoth of a brand that reaches 38 million members in the US, has the highest circulation of any print media in the country and a readership at least partly made up of people with money. I take it all back; smart move by Clooney.
Peter Mandelson: ‘My regard for Jeffrey Epstein was the size of a matchbox! Or a shoebox at most. Definitely not bigger than a shoebox.’ Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/AFP/Getty ImagesThursday
I wouldn’t take a kid to see Oh, Mary!, obviously, but I’d also hesitate to take anyone under 15 to see Sondheim. Clever programming at the Barbican, however, means I might do it. News this week of a forthcoming production of Sunday in the Park with George featuring Wicked co-stars, Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey, is a clever piece of programming for the theatre’s 2027 season that will be even harder to get tickets for than Kenneth Branagh’s forthcoming The Tempest at the RSC.
I have a soft spot for Grande after being made to sit in a room for what seemed like decades while Sam and Cat played in the background. But even the attraction of a former Nickelodeon star won’t take the edge off this hard sell. Sondheim is long, and to get my kids out of the house I’ll have to lie about the running time, again, despite poor results in this area. I told my kids Operation Mincemeat was only 80 minutes long and by the end of the pushing-towards-three-hour-long production on a school night there were some very cranky faces indeed.
Friday
Lovely to read about Alan Rickman in all the tributes collated by the Guardian this week to mark the 10th anniversary of his death. It sent me back to his diaries, one of the great reading experiences, in which Rickman is waspish, indignant, very pissy indeed and wonderfully, warmly entertaining. One anecdote that stayed with me: after attending a party thrown by the Guardian in the late 1990s, Rickman remarked that, even for an actor accustomed to this kind of thing, he had never seen a group of people more uncontrollably drunk and disorderly. Proud, yes, surprised, no.