Entertainment Betting–2017 Golden Globes Odds
–The Golden Globe Awards honors excellence in television and film
–2017 will be the 74th Golden Globe Awards
–The award winners are selected by members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association(HFPA)
For the film industry the Academy Awards is the ‘Super Bowl’ of awards show. If we were to use the football metaphor about the Golden Globe Awards it would strictly be a more entertaining version of a preseason game. A more appropriate description–it’s a watered down version of those great ‘Celebrity Roasts’ that Dean Martin used to do in the 1970’s only with a few awards handed out.
Do these awards have any significance? It depends on who you talk to. ‘The Industry’ likes them since it’s a great way to promote a film. An otherwise overlooked film could benefit from slapping ‘5 Golden Globe Nominations’ above the title. At one point, the Golden Globes were considered a predictive indicator for several of the Academy Award categories though that’s never really been the case. The rap on the Golden Globe Awards is that they’re selected by a small, insular group of about 90 entertainment industry journalists based in Southern California. They select the nominees and the winners and given the homogeneous nature of the voters and the ‘small sample size’ it doesn’t really do anything to approximate what the Academy Awards voters might do.
This is where the fun begins. The HFPA has been accused of being predisposed to vote for big stars, partially to help get a good turnout of ‘A Listers’ to attend the awards. Plus they just like hanging out with celebrities. To be honest, I have a hard time questioning that logic given the position they’re in. To their credit, the Academy Awards has always tried to focus on the performance and not the ‘star power’ of the nominees. That’s why 80 year old Jessica Tandy won ‘Best Actress’ for ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ and Kathy Bates won for ‘Misery’. With all due respect to the considerable talents of these two women if I’m voting for someone to party with I’ll go with Natalie Portman.
BOOZY FUN FOR THE WHOLE SHOW BIZ FAMILY
This brings us to the crux of the Golden Globes’ appeal for TV viewers, celebrities, journalists, industry types, etc. It’s a lot more fun than most awards shows. At one point, celebrities were expected to show up to any awards show drunk and/or strung out on drugs. In the 70’s everybody was on drugs. Even the ‘old school’ celebrities that your parents liked were heavy drinkers. That continued into the 80’s but today it’s considered an affront to the gravitas of the entertainment industry. It’s reached the point that even being drunk at the Grammy Awards gets a lot of judgemental whispers and gossip posing as concern. It wasn’t that long ago that every musician from Frank Sinatra to Stevie Wonder would show up under the influence of drugs and drinks like they were Slash and Duff McKagan of Guns’n’Roses at the American Music Awards back in the ‘Appetite For Destruction’ era. Now, it’s all boring corporate drivel with the sort of decadant behavior you’d expect at a multilevel marketing convention in the San Fernando Valley. Even MTV has joined the ‘no fun’ fray–when Pink gave a rambling, drunken acceptance speech at the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards she was criticized and castigated by MTV on air ‘talent’, the media and her peers.
The neo-Puritanism of the entertainment industry is why the Golden Globes is one of the more palatable awards shows of the year. The vibe isn’t as uptight and the booze flows freely. USA TODAY called the Golden Globes “the award season’s booziest night of stars and acceptance speeches”. They went on to explain the difference between the Academy Awards and the Golden Globe Awards: “The Academy Awards is the most prestigious of the awards shows. The three-hour Golden Globes, on the other hand, is a place where stars can try out fashion, sample parts of speeches and, frankly, get drunk.” The Daily Beast called it ‘the Oscars drunk, corrupt cousin.” Even a reasonably serious actress like Cate Blanchett admitted she was drunk during her Golden Globes acceptance speech.
Unlike the Academy Awards which is so tightly run it feels choreographed the Golden Globes is fun because it always has the potential of going completely off the rails. The Academy Awards is nothing but Hollywood ‘A Listers’. The Golden Globes is much more egalitarian with huge stars rubbing shoulders (?) with C Listers from TV shows, supermodels and anonymous scantily clad women who are referred to as ‘socialites’. It’s hard not to appreciate the Hollywood Foreign Press Association orchestrating an event where they can hobnob with sexy women in sultry dresses lubricated by copious amounts of booze.
We’ll have two sets of Golden Globes betting odds. First, we’ll go down the odds to win the major categories. In our next post we’ll have a bunch of fun ‘special proposition’ bets:
74TH GOLDEN GLOBES ‘TO WIN’ ODDS
Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture — Drama
Casey Affleck (Manchester by the Sea): -350
Denzel Washington (Fences): +250
Andrew Garfield (Hacksaw Ridge): +1400
Joel Edgerton (Loving): +1500
Viggo Mortensen (Captain Fantastic): +1800
Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture — Drama
Natalie Portman (Jackie): -750
Amy Adams (Arrival): +750
Isabelle Huppert (Elle):+800
Ruth Negga (Loving): +1200
Jessica Chastain (Miss Sloane): +2000
Best Motion Picture — Drama
Manchester by the Sea: -170
Moonlight: +110
Hacksaw Ridge: +700
Lion: +1250
Hell or High Water: +2000
Best Motion Picture — Musical/Comedy
La La Land: -5000
20th Century Women: +1250
Deadpool: +2500
Florence Foster Jenkins: +2750
Sing Street: +3000
Best Director
Damien Chazelle (La La Land): -350
Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester by the Sea): +400
Barry Jenkins (Moonlight): +550
Tom Ford (Nocturnal Animals): +2750
Mel Gibson (Hacksaw Ridge): +3500