Golden Globe Wrap-Up: A Good Night To Be Kate Winslet

Kate Winslet: Sure, she talks too much, but those two Golden Globe awards look pretty good on her. Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

 

by Linda Holmes

Maybe Kate Winslet knew she was going to win two Golden Globe awards last night for her lead performance in Revolutionary Road and her supporting performance in The Reader. Maybe that explains why she was one of the only actresses on stage who had combed her hair.

Winslet's two big-shot acting trophies made her the most visible individual winner of the evening, but the hulking powerhouse of the ceremony on the movie side was Slumdog Millionaire, which took home the award for outstanding drama, as well as awards for its screenplay, score, and director. As we noted when the nominations came out, the Hollywood Foreign Press snubbed Milk pretty brutally from the outset, and the one big chance they gave it passed last night when Sean Penn lost out to Mickey Rourke of The Wrestler in the closely-watched race for Best Actor.

Heath Ledger's supporting performance as the Joker was The Dark Knight's one big win, which only adds to the perception that his Oscar is probably inevitable. Not only because the performance is spectacular, but because it's the only aspect of the stupendously popular film has any awards momentum at all, and the Academy is unlikely to let it walk away with nothing.

The television side and 30 Rock's continuing roll, after the jump...

The television awards went mostly to HBO for its miniseries John Adams and Recount, and for the series True Blood and In Treatment. The big exception was Mad Men, which made it to the stage once but made it count, winning Outstanding Television Series (Drama). As far as the Globes are concerned, the networks might as well get out of the drama business.

Comedy was an entirely different story. 30 Rock took the top three prizes, for Outstanding Television Series (Comedy) and for lead actors Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin. Unfortunately, supporting actors at the Golden Globes are thrown together, whether they perform in comedies, dramas, or miniseries -- so for once, Jeremy Piven of Entourage got out of Neil Patrick Harris' way, but they both lost to Tom Wilkinson in John Adams.

As a side note, the TV sensibilities of the Golden Globes are always interesting: they look ossified this year, in that they were dominated by conventional HBO dramas with very little from other cable networks, particularly FX. In the past, they've gone out on a limb to honor some shows that were not Emmy favorites -- particularly The X-Files, which won three Golden Globes for Outstanding Drama but lost (and lost and lost) the comparable Emmys. It would have been wonderful to see them show the love to Friday Night Lights or The Wire that both richly deserve and have never gotten.

As for the ceremony itself, Winslet sullied her victories a tad by yammering on for substantially too long in her second speech -- particularly when she'd already given one! -- which increased the pressure on the remaining winners to say almost nothing. Mickey Rourke stumbled on his way up to the podium to thank his dogs and Axl Rose, but whether he was intoxicated or simply a clumsy fellow benefiting from the traditional suspicion that everyone at the Golden Globes has overindulged at the open bar is impossible to know. His director, Darren Aronofsky, could perhaps have done himself a favor by refraining from reacting to Rourke's mention of his name by enthusiastically extending his directorial middle finger in plain view of the prime-time cameras. Stay classy, there, Darren Aronofsky.

But the best acceptance speech of the night came, as you might expect, from the can't-miss minds at 30 Rock. Tina Fey has done so much award-accepting lately that it was nice to see the show award picked up by Tracy Morgan, who plays an extremely strange character on the show and is constantly dogged by suspicions that he might not be entirely acting. Morgan stepped to the microphone, announced that he and Tina Fey had agreed that he could speak for the show in the event Barack Obama won the election, and joyfully yelled that he was "the face of post-racial America." And then he added, "Deal with it, Cate Blanchett!" It was very, very, very strange, but also delightfully loopy. When you've been sitting through hours of people thanking their agents and lawyers, a guy hollering "Jeff Zucker, my boy!" at the head of NBC Universal looks close to brilliant.