'Bribed' Golden Globe judges nominate flops after Vegas junket

Wafting over the red carpets this awards season, amid the expensive cologne and forced smiles: a dubious whiff of scandal. The Golden Globes, supposedly Hollywood's second most prestigious awards event after the Oscars, is finding its often-criticised voting process at the centre of unwelcome controversy.

At issue is a decision by members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), organisers of the annual exercise in back-patting, to shortlist two recently released but highly derided studio films – The Tourist and Burlesque – in the "Best Motion Picture (musical or comedy)" category for next month's event.

The move initially surprised pundits, since both films received unsympathetic reviews and hit cinemas to public apathy. Burlesque, which, according to the aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, got positive write-ups from only 38 per cent of critics, opened fourth in the box office charts and made back just $34m (£22m) of its $55m budget. The Tourist, panned by 79 per cent of reviewers, returned a mere $22m of its $100m budget. Disbelief later turned to mild outrage, however, after it emerged that Sony, the studio behind the clunker Burlesque, recently flew Golden Globes judges to Las Vegas for an all-expenses-paid trip which included luxury hotel accommodation, free meals and a private concert performed by the film's star, Cher.

It's always difficult to say where lobbying ends and flat-out bribery begins. But the junket can hardly have failed to help to persuade members of the HFPA to nominate the film, which was dubbed "achingly dull" by The New York Times, and described by Variety as "over-wrought" and "underwritten", as the best comedy or musical they had seen in the previous year.

The allegation is nothing new: throughout its history, the HFPA has been regarded as an organisation whose members are easily swayed by luxury goods and other treats. In 1999, Sharon Stone presented each member with a gold watch days before they received voting forms. She was duly nominated for the Best Actress award.

In 1981, most famously of all, the unknown Pia Zadora won a Best Newcomer award for her role in Butterfly, a film which had been universally derided. It later emerged that the movie's producer, who was also her husband, had flown the entire HFPA to Las Vegas for a weekend holiday immediately before they voted.

Part of the reason for criticism may be that, as a private organisation with only 81 members, the HFPA is beholden to no one and considered relatively easy to influence. To win a Globe, you need to charm only a few dozen voters. To win an Oscar, by contrast, you must lobby roughly 6,000 members of the Academy.

The other explanation for bizarre voting patterns at the Golden Globes – where the Best Drama has gone on to win Best Picture at the Oscars only once in the past six years – lies with its status as a made-for-TV event. It makes roughly $6m a year for the HFPA, and about $27m in advertising revenue for its broadcaster, NBC.

Those figures are dependent on viewers bothering to watch, though. And many believe Globes judges deliberately nominate major A-listers so that they can guarantee the celebrity quota at their event.

Robert Licuria, editor at the awards tracking website Gold Derby, told reporters last week that the nominations were "hideous", adding that it was "the best example of how [the Golden Globes] tend to be in awe of the big celebrities, and are sometimes perceived to be driven by who they can invite to the party". In a move that lays bare the fact that not even recipients take the event too seriously, Angelina Jolie revealed that she had reacted to her nomination for The Tourist as a joke. "We were laughing because it's the first time that I've been in the comedic category so it's new for me."