I don't have much to say about the Golden Globes except Patricia and I watched them—the first hour live before heading out to a Sunday-night dinner party, the rest on DVR Monday as she recovered from oral surgery and I built an IKEA TV cart. (Their motto: so easy even Erik Lundegaard can build one.) I wrote about the sorry history of the Globes last year, and if anything was surprsing this year it was the lack of sorry history. Sure, I would‘ve gone Mulligan over Bullock for best actress, and Damon or Stuhlberg for best actor in a comedy or musical over Downey, Jr.—even though I haven’t seen “Sherlock Holmes” and love me some Downey, Jr.—but it's not a bad list. Gervais was funny, rippingly so at times, most of the speeches were good. Two highlights:

• Michael Giacchino winning best soundtrack for “Up.” He gets to the podium, has to squeeze in past Cher, who doesn't seem to know where she is, and says: “I just can't believe Paul McCartney said, ‘Go, Michael!’ That's like awesome. I don't know if I have anything else to say, that's like the greatest thing in my life right there.” Anyone of a like age, even non-musicians, know what he's talking about. He went on to talk about Pixar as his family. It was short, sweet, heartwarming, spoke to a generation.
• Martin Scorsese winning the Cecil B. DeMille Award. The highlight reel worked well in terms of theme and music, but, like most things these days, I thought it was too quick-cut, went too fast. But it was Marty's speech I truly loved. Even this went too fast for me. I could listen to him talk about movies for hours and days, not minutes, and recommend, if you haven't seen them, or even if you have, his two documentaries on movies: “A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies” and “My Voyage to Italy.” As I wrote two years I still hope to someday see “A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through World Cinema.” His speech Sunday night had elements of that in it. It focused not on his accomplishments but the accomplishments of the medium:

If you‘ve ever sat through the end credits of a movie you know how many people it takes to make a picture: 200, 300, 500. If it’s an average of even 300, and I‘ve made 40, 50 movies, including documentaries, that’s quite a lot. And saying that movies is a collaborative process is not a cliche, it's the truth. I‘ve collaborated with a lot of people, many of them are here tonight. I want to thank them all. ...

I’m especially moved and grateful to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. They‘ve provided The Film Foundation with enormous support for more than 12 years, making possible the restoration of over 70 films. Just a couple of titles: masterpieces like Stanley Kubruck’s “Paths of Glory,” Elia Kazan's “A Face in the Crowd,” and the stunning new color restoration of Michael Powell's and Emmeric Pressburger's “The Red Shoes.” Without this generosity the film community would be poorer indeed and the history of film would be incomplete. Because as William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It is not even past.” And as far as I'm concerned, making films and preserving them are the same thing. In this room, none of us who make films and watch them would be here without the people who came here before us. Whether it’s DeMille, Hitchcock, the Senegalese filmmaker Sembène, Kurosawa or John Ford, de Sica, Bergman, Satiajit Ray, we’re all walking in their footsteps, every day, all of us…

That's total class. If Gervais pricked the self-importance of stars and awards shows, Scorsese showed why what was being awarded Sunday night mattered after all.

“Because as William Faulkner said, ‘The past is never dead. It is not even past.’ And as far as I'm concerned, making films and preserving them are the same thing. In this room, none of us who make films and watch them would be here without the people who came before us.”