After Sunday night's Golden Globe Awards show last night, I asked my followers and friends on Facebook and Twitter what grade they'd give to Ricky Gervais, the telecast's first host in 15 years.
The couple dozen responses ranged from A+ to a C-, and while I'm not averaging them out, I think he delivered a solid B performance. Like many of those responding, I think the biggest weakness in his performance was that he wasn't on long enough.
Many presenters were introduced by a faceless announcer, but Gervais' funniest moment came with this introduction:
"I like a drink as much as the next man, unless the next man is Mel Gibson." Gibson played right along.
The Golden Globes are voted on by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and are considered more of an entertaining diversion than an indicator of how the Oscars will go next month.
But if you're interested, here's a complete list of the winners.
Gervais won the host spot after a performance as presenter who didn't show much respect for the award he was giving out. The joke all along was that he wouldn't be brought back for a second hosting gig. And he repeated it Sunday night.
"One thing that can't be bought is a Golden Globe," he said, pausing for a second, "Officially."
As the laughter died down, he repeated, "I'm not going to do this again anyway."
If he does get a second shot, let's hope he gets more time to mock the silliness of all awards shows.
As you'd expect, NBC's late night mess was the topic of humor Sunday night, from Gervais' own "Let's get on with it before NBC replaces me with Jay Leno;" to Tom Hanks' assessment of the rainy weather on the red carpet: "NBC said it was gonna rain at 10, but they moved it to 11:30."
But the best line came from Tina Fey and it also came on the red carpet before the show.
"It's not rain," she said of the weather. "It's just God crying for NBC."
Radio on the move: WUWM-FM (89.7) starts broadcasting today from its new studios, the 7th Floor of the Chase Tower, 111 E. Wisconsin Ave. It has spent the last decade in the windowless lower level of the Grand Avenue Mall.
The Milwaukee Public Radio station's phones will be out of commission until Wednesday as the move is completed.
On TV: Meetings reportedly continued over the weekend as NBC and Conan O'Brien work out the terms of their divorce. By most accounts, he'll walk away with around $30 million and could be back on TV by this fall, is he strikes a deal with one NBC's competitors.
- Speaking of Coco, as his fans call O'Brien, his Friday night show beat David Letterman's CBS show, according to Nielsen Media Research numbers that showed a 50% boost for O'Brien.
- And in one last bit of Coco news, FX is the latest chanel to express interest in a post-NBC O'Brien show, with the channel's president telling reporters he could see him in something other than a conventional late-night talk show.
- CBS says it has a remake of "Hawaii Five-O" in the works.
The Fox-savvy Brett Favre: The post-game performance by Brett Favre in the Vikings locker room Sunday afternoon shows the signs of his media handlers.
We're into the second week of Warholian celebrity status for "General" Larry Platt and his "Pants on the Ground" performance on Fox's "American Idol," and Favre offered his own take on the tune.
Don't be surprised if this performance earns Number 4 some face time, or pants time, on "Idol" at 7 p.m. Tuesday on Channel 6:
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
