Sometimes the best part of a live show are the mistakes. Even with an awards show as important as the Golden Globes there were glitches abound, both technical and otherwise. The red carpet was flooded with sewage not long before the stars arrived, the room was designed as some sort of maze so the winners had to pick their way around chairs for, like, 25 minutes to make their acceptance speeches, and best-of-all there were teleprompter fails. I love the failed teleprompter because it's an exciting moment to see an actor in their natural habitat. Or for some, their not-so-natural habitat because despite the fact that these guys get paid a ton of money to act, some of them have a hard time ad-libbing off the cuff when the teleprompters fail. Perhaps this is because they've been trained to learn lines and can't think for themselves anymore (gasp!)
Since the Golden Globes (and all award shows) are about picking winners and mocking actors, I'm going to do the very same here. I'm going to rate the actors' acting chops on a scale of one to ten based on how they respond to teleprompter fails.
Jonah Hill and Margot Robbie
At last night's Golden Globes, Hill and Robbie were thrown for a loop when the teleprompter showed the wrong speech.
"I'm not gonna lie to you, right now they put up the wrong stuff on the teleprompter," Hill informed the crowd. "This is for Aaron Eckhart and Paula Patton."
Gotta love the faces of two people who don't know what to do:
"I've never done this before, so I don't want to improvise," Robbie said sweetly, making me raise her grade a little because she was a nervous first-timer. But ultimately the major mess-up here? They were introducing The Wolf of Wall Street, which wastheir own movie. Come on guys, it wasn't like you were reading a list of nominees, you literally just had to say some words about the plot of your movie. I'm slightly concerned that maybe they actually have no idea what it was even about. Here's a synopsis that Hill eventually read off a piece of paper a Golden Globes staff member handed them:
Score: Jonah Hill: 0, Margot Robbie: 1
Paul Rudd and Selma Hayek
At last year's Golden Globes a teleprompter error caused Paul Rudd's adorableness to shine while Hayek just opened and closed her mouth a lot not knowing what to do.
After walking onto the stage and noticing that their teleprompter wasn't working, Rudd put on a charming grin and addressed the crowd. "Hello. How's everybody doing? Good? Alright, great." It got the room laughing, which made things way less awkward.
Hayek, on the other hand, failed misreably under pressure. It wasn't until the end that she finally got her voice back to half-whisper "something about the best uh...." Not her finest moment.
Score: Paul Rudd: 7, Selma Hayek: 2
Felicity Huffman and Alec Baldwin
At the 2010 Screen Actors Guild Awards, Huffman forgot to bring her glasses, which made reading the teleprompter impossible. "You’re going to have to click up the type because I can’t see that,” she told the technician. Fortunately co-presenter Alec Baldwin stepped in and rescued her.
Score: Felicity Huffman: 3 (at least she was honest about her vision problems), Alec Baldwin: 8
Mindy Kaling and Stephen Amell
At last year's Emmys, Mindy Kaling rambled on a long joke about how Amell's show Arrow was a reality show. It was a painfully un-funny joke from such a usually funny lady. But eventually the culprit of the bad joke was revealed: it was an ad-lib due to a technical glitch. "I thought this was the outstanding reality show competition. What do you think of what we have in store?" she asked. "I think it'd be more exciting if our teleprompter was working," Amell answered.
Score: Mindy Kaling: 7 (because she tried and if the joke had been funny we would have never known the teleprompter was broken.) Amell: 4 (because he ratted her out.)
Michael Bay
The director wasn't at an awards show, he was just giving a talk about bendy television screens on the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month when his telepromoter broke and it broke him. "The type is all off sorry," the director said and then tried to go on with his speech. He grew increasingly agitated though and actually ended up walking off stage without finishing the segment.
Tina Fey later mocked him at the Golden Globes:
Score: 2 (because he at least apologized before he stormed off the stage. I'll give it a ten for entertainment value though)
Images: theworldofcinema/Tumblr, MTV/Tumblr
