Over the last few years, the amount of controversy surrounding the Golden Globes, and its voting body, the Hollywood Foreign Press (HFPA), has grown to great heights. Although awards season is always accompanied by a healthy dose of controversy, there is no awards show that embodies that more than the Globes. Serious allegations have been tossed at the HFPA in the past and that has certainly come to taint its reputability. On the list of questionable decisions made by the voting group for the upcoming awards is this year’s snubbing of Pixar.
The Pixar Perspective on Impatience
It’s been just over a month since Pixar’s newest film, Monsters University, opened wide across North America. While the financial response has been solid—at this point, it seems safe to assume that Monsters University will end up as Pixar’s fourth-highest-grossing film domestically, just behind Up—the critical response was slightly more mild, though not outright negative or contentious. (The film has a 78% on Rotten Tomatoes and 65 out of 100 on Metacritic; neither are bad numbers, of course, and this column has recently pointed out the shakiness of using these critic-aggregation websites as the foundation of an argument against Pixar’s perceived decline. But the rapturous response of some of the studio’s recent films is, by and large, not present for Monsters University, earned or not.) The attitude among some film lovers is either that Pixar’s golden days are permanently over, or that a lack of qualitative consistency is going to be the norm from now on.
