Two days before the Golden Globes, Slate published an article by Tom Shone, the author of Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer, on how the Golden Globes isn't cheap cousin to the Oscars; it's better than the Oscars.

The piece is classic Slate, i.e., contrarian, but Shone's argumentation is sloppy, like GG acceptance speeches, and for a second I thought about responding. Then I read the comments field and realized several readers had done the work for for me.

A reader named Josh B. writes:

Mr. Shone isn't comparing apples with apples. It's easier to reward the right people and films when you give out twice as many awards. For instance, in 1988, the Globes didn't choose Tom Hanks in Big over Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man (which is what the author implies in his list at the end of the article). Rather, both Hanks and Hoffman won acting Globes that year, but in different categories.

Then Ben F. writes:

You also conveniently forgot a few [Golden Globes' picks]:

• “Avatar” and James Cameron beat “The Hurt Locker” and Kathryn Bigelow 
• “Evita” and Madonna beat “Fargo” and Frances McDormand 
• “Scent of a Woman” beat “Unforgiven” and “Howards End”
  

I think both groups make poor choices. Oscars tend to be self-serious while the Globes tend to be star worshiping.

Makes one almost not-wish for the death of comments fields.

Shone also ignored such recent, weak, GG best-drama winners as “Babel” in 2006 (over “The Departed”), and “Atonement” in 2007 (over “No Country for Old Men”). I might add that Shone's opening, in which he imagines a world in which the Golden Globes has the authority of the Oscars, is similar to the opening of a 2005 article I wrote on the National Society of Film Critics. I'm not suggesting plagiarism, of course. I'm merely suggesting that even contrarian articles might not be very original.

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