Although at this point in December next year still feels a million miles away, it is time to start paying attention to 2024. For example, the Golden Globes are on 7 January and an army of people are beavering away to make the event happen.
This week, an announcement was made detailing what the Golden Globes guests would be eating. This “one-of-a-kind culinary experience that redefines the traditional award show menu” turns out to be sushi. Nice sushi, admittedly, since the ceremony has roped in Nobu to make dishes such as sashimi salad and assorted nigiri. But, barring plates of black cod miso, it’s still just sushi.
There’s a danger here, of course, as the Golden Globes have carved a niche as the looser, messier sister of the Oscars. People drink at this show. They drink, and they probably all have empty stomachs. Is something as light as sushi going to soak everything up? Well, it might contain rice, but hardly. There will be carnage, mark my words. That didn’t happen last year, when the boozed-up actors got to line their stomachs with a risotto. And in 2014, the Globes doubled down by giving each attendee a tiny rectangle of pitta bread. This demonstrates a level of sense that is notably absent this year.
Perhaps the trouble is that the Golden Globes are desperately trying to keep up with the Oscars, which is leagues ahead in this area. From humble beginnings (at the first-ever Oscars, guests ate chicken on toast), the ceremony endured a lengthy Beefeater-restaurant-style era (ham and melon, pate, beef and mushroom) before the chef Wolfgang Puck took over almost three decades ago. Puck took a while to find his feet. Although he tried his best during his first few years, offering steak and lamb chops and pizza, celebrities still found a way to get him to cook whatever they wanted. In 2012, Puck said that Barbra Streisand found him and requested a chicken pot pie, while Tom Cruise asked for steak.
Catering to the whims of hundreds of assembled celebrities, each of them desperate to one-up their rivals in terms of status, sounds like a nightmare, which may be what led Puck to his masterstroke. The Oscars are called the Oscars because they hand out Oscars, so why not make every piece of food into the shape of an Oscar? Puck unveiled the first offerings of his new approach in 2004, creating an Oscar-shaped cookie for guests to enjoy. This was followed by the introduction of slices of smoked salmon shaped like Oscars, along with Oscar-shaped flatbreads. Now the man seems gripped by a mania to make as many Oscar-shaped foodstuffs as he can, including Oscar-shaped puddings and small chocolate Oscars dipped in gold dust.
This is what these people deserve. After all, it doesn’t matter whether or not any of this food is good. What’s important is that it all looks like an army of little men, which serves the dual purpose of a) looking cool on Instagram and b) making the human-sized actors feel like giant all-powerful godlike figures by comparison. This isn’t a feeling you can readily achieve with sushi alone.
What is incredible is that it would be the easiest thing in the world to make food that looked like a Golden Globe, because a Golden Globe is just a ball on a plinth. Almost every known foodstuff could, with the slightest manipulation, be made to look like a Golden Globe. An upright sausage with a satsuma on top. An arancina, or arancinu, depending on your dialect, balanced on a churro. An olive stuck in some liquorice. An onion on a Mars bar.
The point is, I shouldn’t have to be thinking these things up for the Golden Globes. The ceremony barely made it out of its most recent controversy in one piece, and it loses ground to the Oscars with every passing year. Does it think that sushi will be enough to make everything OK? Normal sushi, that isn’t even an appropriate combination of cylinders and spheres? Hardly.
Up your game next time, Golden Globes.