Celebrating famous female cannabis connoisseurs throughout herstory to the present day.
All contents copyrighted. "Bright Leaf" artwork by Jean Hanamoto, camomoto at Spoonflower.com
Angelina Jolie is winning acclaim and award nominations for her portrayal of O.G. opera diva Maria Callas in the movie Maria, which follows Callas through the last seven days of her life, with fuzzy flashbacks to her earlier days. It is the third and final film in a trilogy depicting iconic 20th-century women from Chilean director Pablo Larrain, following Jackie (2016) starring Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy and Spencer (2021) with Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana.
In Maria, Callas is shown taking Mandrax, a combination of the hypnotic sedative drug methaqualone (Quaaludes) and the anti-histamine/sedative diphenhydramine (Benadryl). Popular in Europe in the 70s, commercial production of Mandrax was halted in the mid-1980s due to its widespread abuse and addictiveness.
An imaginary young filmmaker whose name is Mandrax appears to interview Callas, setting up a conversation between her and the drug, or her hallucination while taking it. By this strange conceit Maria's life is revisited as she works on recovering her largely lost etherial singing voice just before dying.
To prepare for her role, Jolie spent seven months training to sing opera. Mostly she lip-synched to Callas's divine recordings, but she did that well. The film premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival where Jolie received a "rapturous" eight-minute standing ovation towards the end of the screening.
Jolie has said she doesn't enjoy marijuana, but that by the age of 20, she'd used "just about every drug possible," including heroin. Episodes of depression and two suicide attempts, plus a nervous breakdown at age 24 lead to her being institutionalized for 72 hours at the UCLA Medical Center psychiatric ward. Her breakthrough role, for which she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, was as a wild child institutionalized with Winona Ryder in Girl, Interrupted. She won Golden Globe and SAG awards for playing model Gia Carangi, a heroin addict who died of AIDS in 1986. "Playing the madness and insanity, hearing voices, there's my wheelhouse," Jolie said of her approach to the role as Callas.
One of the most renowned and influential opera singers of the 20th century, "La Callas" aka La Divina ("The Divine One") was highly praised for her bel canto technique, powerful and wide-ranging voice, and dramatic interpretations.
Born in New York City to Greek immigrant parents, Callas began her musical education in Greece at age 13 and later established her career in Italy. In a flashback, the film shows her and her sister at a young age prostituted to German soldiers by their mother while the family was poverty stricken during WWII.
Callas burst on the scene with roles like the Druid princess Norma in the Bellini/Romani opera, where she sings to a Moon Goddess:
Casta Diva, che inargenti
Chaste Goddess, how silvery
Queste sacre, queste sacre
These sacred, these sacred
Queste sacre antiche piante...
These sacred ancient plants
Overweight as a child and into her career, some think Callas's voice lost its power when she rapidly lost 80 pounds in her 20s to look more attractive onstage, reportedly modeling herself on Audrey Hepburn. She seems to have never gotten over her lover Aristotle Onassis marrying Jackie Kennedy, although in the film he's shown putting Callas down as she outshines him. She reportedly was impregnated more than once by Onassis, who either wouldn't support her having his child, or she was unable to. In the 70s, reporters began castigating her for her fiery temperament and waning voice, instead of laying the flowers at her feet she deserved.
I couldn't find record of Callas taking Mandrax, and Maria's screenwriter Steven Knight admits it's a stretch, though she is said to have used or abused weight loss and other prescription drugs. Records do show that she took cortisone and immunosuppressants to treat dermatomyositis, a degenerative disease that affects the muscles and tissues, including the larynx. In the film,she says she takes them to keep from becoming a frog. That a singer of her magnitude should be stricken with such a disease is a tragedy of operatic proportions, akin to Beethoven losing his hearing. The drugs used to treat dermatomyositis can ultimately lead to heart failure. Maria Callas died of cardiac arrest at the age of 53.
In Maria, the last aria she sings is "Vissi d'arte" from Tosca by Puccini:
Vissi d'arte, vissi d'amore...
I lived for art, I lived for love
Nell'ora del dolore
perché, perché, Signore,
perché me ne rimuneri così?
In this hour of grief, why, why, Lord,
why do you reward me thus?
Her death scene gets the Hollywood treatment, complete with an imaginary orchestra, but I was glad to see her exalted in this way. Brava.
Well, now I can say I've met, and worked for, a Presidential Medal of Freedom winner.
Among those bestowed last week with this "highest" civilian honor in the land was George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist whose Open Society Foundation funds human rights projects internationally, with $32 billion of his personal wealth. Soros also funded the Drug Policy Alliance, for which I worked in San Francisco around the turn of the millennium.
I met George only once, briefly, and said something stupid like, "Thank you for my job." By then I'd been a volunteer activist for over a decade, and working at what was then called the Lindesmith Center was my first real paying gig in the field. I'd received a few Soros dollars while petitioning for Prop. 215, California's pioneering medical marijuana law, but ended up turning in most of my signatures as a volunteer to bolster those numbers in the funders' eyes.
I was the only activist and only non-Ivy leaguer ever hired by the organization, and my tenure didn't last all that long. But while I was there, I got to spend some of Soros's money on a seminar series addressing issues like racism in the drug war long before the idea had permeated the public consciousness. I also helped plan conferences like the "Just Say Know" drug education conference and another on MDMA. I sat on SF Public Health committees on raves and heroin overdose, and got sent on Soros's dime to Jersey (the island, not the state) to present a poster I'd made about naloxone, the antidote to overdose that was then almost unheard of.
When I got to Lindesmith/DPA, the Drug War was seldom if ever questioned by politicians, the people, or the media. Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" era had just ended, and police were lining their pockets with drug proceeds, funding their departments with forfeited bank accounts, homes and more from those merely accused of a drug crime under a Reagan-era resurrection of an old admiralty law that erased due process.
Lead by former Princeton professor Ethan Nadelmann, DPA made it their mission to highlight the unconstitutional and unAmerican excess of the drug war, and its failures, and the strategy worked. I remember the moment I saw it happen: then-drug "czar" Barry McCaffrey was headed to an event in Vallejo, CA to rally locals into an anti-drug frenzy, and a local news channel came to interview me beforehand. I pointed out that while McCaffrey touted drug prevention, his administration's budget continued to overspend on interdiction, and the news report cut to me saying so, and interviewed a man on the street who questioned spending tax money in Columbia instead of poverty-stricken Vallejo.
DPA later funded Michelle Alexander's research for her breakthrough book "The New Jim Crow" that blew the lid off the drug war / race connection, and allowed politicians like Kamala Harris to finally embrace marijuana legalization.
Soros has become a bête noire of the radical right, for his funding of progressive DA's around the country. We're now seeing a bit of backlash as the US figures out that a public health solution to drug addiction requires actual investment in public health. But to me Soros is much more of a hero and freedom fighter than today's gazillionaires who are spending their money on shooting off penis-shaped rockets to space or electing one of their own who only claims to be a populist.
Ironically, as President Biden left the ceremony awarding the medal (to Soros's son Alex), he ignored a question about releasing federal marijuana prisoners before he leaves office, something he promised to do while on the campaign trail in 2020. Trump, who just got zero prison time for 34 felony convictions, awarded the Medal of Freedom to Reagan's anti-drug AG Edwin Meese, and is scheduled to take office in a week.
Rhea Perlman and Blythe Danner in I'll See You in My Dreams
In I'll See You in My Dreams (2015), Blythe Danner plays Carol, a retired schoolteacher whose husband Bill, a lawyer, died in a plane crash 20 years before the film begins. Carol lives a tranquil existence in a comfortable home in Southern California. Her usual activities are watching TV while drinking wine, and playing golf or bridge with her gal pals who live in a nearby retirement home.
The film begins with Carol putting her dog down, leaving a hole in her life. A rat soon appears in her house, leading to an encounter with her young pool guy Lloyd (Martin Starr), whom she enlists to scout out her unwelcome visitor. The mismatched (age-wise) couple bond over a shared love of music, and he rekindles her interest in singing, taking her out to a karaoke bar where she sings "Cry Me a River" while her young friend looks on adoringly. Meanwhile, another Bill, played by Sam Elliott, appears to sweep her off her feet with fancy wine-filled dinners in a restaurant or on his boat.
June Squibb takes a toke from a vaporizer
All this seems to cause a re-examination of life by Carol. When her bridge buddy Sally (Rhea Perlman) asks if she wants a refill on her chardonnay, Carol instead asks, "Do you have any more of that medical marijuana?" Sally brings out a vaporizer and the gals indulge, lead by the game-for-anything Georgina (June Squibb), who announces she knows how to use the device, takes a big hit, and remarks, "Oh man, oh jeez, that's great." The brash-yet-timid Rona (Mary Kay Place, who smoked a joint with William Hurt in The Big Chill) also joins in the fun, boogying down to "Groovin" while Carol has a stare-down with an owl-shaped cookie jar in the kitchen, and Sally acts as the down-to-earth shaman/guide. The foursome heads out to the local minimart for a junk food run, and while heading home with a shopping cart, encounter a cute young cop (Reid Scott) who lets them go despite their strange behavior.
Danner, who was 70 when she starred in I'll See You, won the 1970 Tony award for her role in "Butterflies Are Free" (played by Goldie Hahn in the movie). She's had a long film career (1776, The Last of the Belles, Alice) and won back-to-back Emmys in 2005 and 2006 for her role as Hank Azaria's mother in "Huff" (an interesting show in which Azaria and Angelica Houston play pot-smoking psychiatrists that was cancelled before Danner could make her second acceptance speech). Her role in I'll See You in My Dreams scored her a Satellite Award nomination from the International Press Academy. Danner's daughter Gwyneth Paltrow has admitted to vaping and power-puffed in "The Politician."
Danner stares down an owl in "I'll See You in My Dreams"
Sam Elliott went on to smoke a joint with Lily Tomlin in Grandma and reads a mock marijuana ad (with that killer deep voice of his) while smoking with his dealer played by Nick Offerman in The Hero, both released in 2017. He played a redneck rancher formerly married to the pot-puffing Debra Winger in the Netflix series "The Ranch."
Writers on I'll See You include two men and Isabelle Hope Dane, whose film Perfect High also released in 2015 tells the story of a teenager who goes from prescription drug sharing to heroin addiction. Though it's kind of a girls' romp, one wonders if the ending would have been happier in role reversal. Carol's new Bill also dies suddenly, and she leaves the mutual attraction between her and Lloyd unconsummated, even after he catches her rat and sings her a sweet song he wrote about loss leading to the film's title. In the end, Carol adopts a new, older dog and apparently lives happily ever after with her canine companion, as the gals plan a vacation cruise to Iceland.
Emerging as a breakout star at President Jimmy Carter's state funeral is his grandson Jason Carter, whose eulogy has been praised as moving as well as humorous. The Irish Star said Carter "blew funeral-goers away" with his "powerful" speech, after which commentators urged him to run for President or some office.
Joking that his down-to-earth grandparents had a rack by their sink to dry rinsed Ziploc bags, Carter said in all his 49 years, he never perceived a difference between his grandfather's public face and his private one. He continued,
As you heard from the other speakers, his political life and his presidency, for me, was not just ahead of its time. It was prophetic.
He had the courage and strength to stick to his principles even when they were politically unpopular. As governor of Georgia half a century ago, he preached an end to racial discrimination and an end to mass incarceration. As president in the 1970s, as you’ve heard, he protected more land than any other president in history.
Fifty years ago he was a climate warrior who pushed for a world where we conserved energy, limited emissions and traded our reliance on fossil fuels for expanded renewable sources.
By the way, he cut the deficit, wanted to decriminalize marijuana, deregulated so many industries that he gave us cheap flights and, as you heard, craft beer. Basically all of those years ago, he was the first millennial. And he could make great playlists, as we’ve heard as well….
But his life was also a broader love story about love for his fellow humans, and about living out the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. I believe that that love is what taught him and told him to preach the power of human rights, not just for some people, but for all people. It focused him on the power and the promise of democracy, its love for freedom, its requirement and founding belief in the wisdom of regular people raising their voices and the requirement that you respect all of those voices, not just some.
Jason Carter served in the Georgia State Senate from 2010 to 2015 and was the Democratic Party nominee for governor of Georgia in 2014. He is the son of Jack Carter, who was ousted from the Navy in 1970 for smoking marijuana, and journalist Judy Langford, the daughter of former Georgia state senator James Beverly Langford. After graduating from Duke University with a double major in philosophy and political science, Carter served in the Peace Corps stationed in South Africa. In doing so he followed the example of his great grandmother, Lillian Carter (President Jimmy Carter's mother), who became a Peace Corps volunteer at age 68 and spent nearly two years in India working as a nurse with patients with leprosy. Carter later attended the University of Georgia School of Law, graduating summa cum laude with a Juris Doctor in 2004. Since November 2015, he has been the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Carter Center.
Also eulogizing Jimmy Carter was his Vice President Walter Mondale via his son Ted. Reading from remarks written by his father in 2015, he spoke about Carter's commitment to the rights of women:
All of us know President Carter elevated human rights to the top of his agenda but sometimes we forget how seriously he pushed to advance the rights of women. He proposed and signed the law extending the period for states to approve the Equal Rights Amendment, which now, finally, has been ratified by three quarters of the states. He appointed women to head the Departments of Commerce, Education, HEW and HUD. Women on his White House staff played crucial roles in developing his highest priority energy and environmental proposals and laws deregulating our oil and gas, trucking and airline industries. And he dramatically increased the ranks of female circuit and district court judges, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In all he appointed five times as many women to the federal bench as all of his predecessors combined.
Two decades ago, President Carter said he believed income inequality was the biggest global issue. Two years ago, in a speech in Lynchburg, he said "I think now... it is the discrimination against women and girls in the world," including the brutal killing of female infants, sexual abuse, human trafficking, honor killings and the rest. He concluded that, until the stubborn attitudes that foster discrimination against women change, the world cannot advance and poverty and income inequality cannot be solved.
Peter Yarrow, a member of the popular 1960s activist folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, has just died, leading me to take another look at him and his song, "Puff, The Magic Dragon."
Yarrow co-wrote what became a universally loved children's song with his Cornell University classmate Lenny Lipton in 1959. Despite calling their dragon "Puff" and setting the tune in what sounds like the marijuana-producing region of Honalei, Hawaii, both authors repeatedly denied the song was inspired by marijuana until the day they died.
In the video above, recorded January 18, 2016 at Paste Studios in NYC, Yarrow strums the chords to "Puff" singing along with an intro claiming that rumors the song contains marijuana references are "spurious." At the time he and Lipton wrote the song at Cornell, he says/sings, "There were no drugs at all. Weed had not come from the West Coast to be with us there. The worst thing we did was go on a panty raid, or have beer in the dorms, or a girl," he added, laughing.
Ginsberg at a LeMar protest in 1963.
I wondered if this was true. Yarrow had that Beatnik look with his sunglasses and close-trimmed beard, and The Beats had access to grass in the 1950s in New York. Allen Ginsberg wrote in his 1966 “Bringdown” manifesto: "I must begin by explaining something that I have already said in public for many years: that I occasionally use marijuana in preference to alcohol, and have for several decades." Jack Kerouac's “On the Road” was written in 1957, and I think by then Lester Young had turned Kerouac onto “tea.”
I checked with pot historian Michael Aldrich, who wrote the first-ever PhD dissertation on marijuana and co-founded the pro-legalization group LeMar along with Ginsberg in New York in the early 70s. "I believe it’s possible that there was little or no pot available at Cornell in mid-60s," Aldrich said, adding that when he was at SUNY Buffalo from 1966-1970 "it was difficult to get raw marijuana."
He adds, however, "Hash from New York was often available including Nepalese temple balls. The first issue of Marijuana Review (a magazine that published availability and pricing of cannabis at the time) doesn’t list Cornell, but Buffalo reportedly had “icepack and gold, $24 an ounce. Influx of several keys expected soon @ $125. Some Lebanese hash available, $15 per gram.”
Michael's wife and longtime activist partner Michelle recalled meeting Yarrow and calling him to ask about "Puff" for a drug songs report the couple was working on for the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse. "He said it is a children’s song….nothing else," she said. "I believe him…we categorically classified it as conjectural."
Michelle Aldrich first met Yarrow in San Antonio in 1965, when he played a concert at Trinity University. "Later that night at the San Antonio airport, which was the only place at night to get coffee, I sat next to him at the counter and he bought me tea and sang me a song. Special..." she said. Michael agrees that "they originally intended Puff the Magic Dragon as merely a children’s song. On the other hand they sang plenty of Dylan songs with dope references," he mused.
Lipton, who died in 2023, said he drew inspiration from Ogden Nash's poem "Custard the Dragon," which seems to have little in common with "Puff" except that Custard was a girl's pet. (That one wasn't "magic" though.) Lipton traces the rumor about a marijuana connection to a column by Dorothy Killgallen, who was generally a pretty reliable source.
Looking up Hanalei, I found that many see a dragon with its head dipping into the water in the cliffs above the beach on the island of Kaui. In a children's book based on the song that he and Yarrow published, Lipton denies any connection to the region. However, in the cover artwork, the dragon looks pretty stoned to me, with its heavy-lidded eyes.
Peter, Paul and Mary were so prominent they performed Bob Dylan's “Blowin’ in the Wind” at the 1963 March on Washington at which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. The group went on to march at Selma, perform at countless demonstrations, and have lots of hit songs.
After recording their last No. 1 hit, a 1969 cover of John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” the trio split up, and in 1970 Yarrow pleaded guilty to taking "improper and immoral" liberties with a 14-year-old girl. He resumed his career after serving three months in jail, and was pardoned by President Jimmy Carter in 1981.
“It was an era of real indiscretion and mistakes by categorically male performers. I was one of them. I got nailed. I was wrong. I’m sorry for it,” Yarrow, who considered himself a recovering alcoholic, once said. “I fully support the current movements demanding equal rights for all and refusing to allow continued abuse and injury - most particularly of a sexual nature, of which I am, with great sorrow, guilty,” he told The New York Times in 2019 after being uninvited from a festival over the incident. Rolling Stone reports that since laws about sexual abuse have changed, others have accused Yarrow of similar behavior.
Although (who knows?) Yarrow may well have been targeted or set up due to his activism (he had just helped plan another March on Washington in 1969), it all makes Yarrow's admission of "panty raids" and sneaking girls into his dorm in the 2016 video rather creepy. Why is that more acceptable than having a little Puff of Marijuana?
P.S. I wrote some alternative lyrics to "Puff" after the feds raided Oaksterdam University in 2012, not knowing it was the 50th anniversary of the song:
A puff of marijuana, it makes you feel so fine
We don’t believe the ones who say That it should be a crime
A puff of marijuana it helps us feel so good
We think it’s time that cannabis Is finally understood
Ogden wrote a memo, the policy was clear
Then James M. Cole he wrote one more
And now we live in fear
Our heads are bent in sorrow
We don’t like Uncle Sam
The feds are fools, they smashed our school
In the land called Oaksterdam
Goodness lives forever, repression only fades
Soon the science will prevail and end this foul charade
One day it will happen The people will endure
And prosecutors everywhere
Will cease their fearsome roar
Obama, keep your promise
Leave our state laws be
Have compassion, do what's right
And set our people free Together we will travel To a more enlightened shore
Where medicine is here for all
And the sick will weep no more
Based on the experiences of writer/director Josh Margolin's 104-year-old grandmother, and marking June Squibb's first leading film role of her 70+ year career, "Thelma" has made Squibb "America's new action hero at the age of 94," according to Jimmy Kimmel.
A longtime stage actress, cruise ship performer, and supporting actress in films, Squibb won an Oscar nomination for the 2013 film "Nebraska" at the age of 84. She played Lena Dunham's grandmother on "Girls" and voiced Gramsy in "Little Ellen," based on the childhood of Ellen DeGeneres.
The 2015 movie "I’ll See You in My Dreams" featured a pot party followed by a munchie run with gal pals played by Squibb, Blythe Danner, Rhea Perlman and Mary Kay Place. The gals are playing cards at their retirement community and not thrilled about drinking more beer or wine, when Danner asks, "Actually, do you still have any of that medical marijuana?" Perlman pulls out a vaporizer and Squibb comments, "It's like pre-heating an oven," then takes a big hit and enthuses, "Oh man, oh jeez, that's great." Giggling ensues.
In "Thelma," Squibb's character gets a scam call from someone pretending to be her grandson in jail, and demanding she send $10,000 to an address in LA's San Fernando Valley to spring him. When she learns she's been scammed, she takes matters into her own hands and sets out to get her money back.
Thelma is shown being baffled by modern gadgets like electric vehicles and computers. She keeps thinking she knows people she sees on the street, and most of the friends she calls for help have had accidents or died. Sneaking up the stairs at a friend's house to grab her gun, she nearly trips on the carpet. But she manages to succeed by hijacking an electric scooter, which Squibb learned to drive so well she performed most of her own stunts in the film. Thelma also uses her hearing aids as a secret-agent tool, and when she encounters the bad guy, played by Malcolm McDowell, she gives him grandmotherly advice.
Rhea Perlman, Blythe Danner, Mary Kay Place and Squibb on a munchie run in "I'll See You in My Dreams" (2015).
Squibb's performance in "Thelma" has been nominated for an AARP "Movies for Grownups" Award, and a Saturn Award. She was nominated for three EDA (Excellent Dynamic Activism) awards by the Alliance of Women Film Journalists: Best Actress, Best Breakthrough Performance, and Best Stunt Performance (which she won).
Playing Thelma's partner in (undoing a) crime is none other than Richard Roundtree, in what turned out to be his final film before his death in 2023. Roundtree was considered the first black action hero when he starred in the "Shaft" movies and TV show in the 1970s. He's still dashing and dapper here at 81, even as his character comes to grips with the limitations that age brings. He tries to tell Thelma about the "many wonderful" benefits of mangoes (one of which is that they can make a marijuana high more intense). But she cuts his message off.
Also featured is the always-sparkling Parker Posey as Thelma's daughter, a psychiatrist who prescribes Zoloft to an anxious patient, warns her son that alcohol is a depressant, and mentions that a friend's son "vapes" and "has no agency." Posey starred as a pot-puffing librarian in the 1995 Indie hit "Party Girl."
Squibb can also be heard as the voice of Nostalgia in "Inside Out 2." Her starring role in Scarlett Johansson's directorial debut "Eleanor the Great" has wrapped.
Asked by Sundance.org, "How do you want people to feel after they see your film," Margolin replied, "I want them to call their oldest living relative to say hi."
Shimmering in a silver gown and an equally sparkling wit, comedienne Nikki Glaser opened her first-ever solo-female hosting of The Golden Globes with a drug joke.
"Welcome to the Golden Globes," she greeted. "Ozempic's biggest night." She followed by noting what a powerful room she was playing to, saying, "You can do anything, except tell people how to vote." That zinger landed, as did the rest of her strong and confident set.
Doing her crowd work mistressfully, Glaser pointed out the "legendary" Harrison Ford, saying she spoke with him backstage. "I asked him if he would rather work with Zendaya or Ariana, and he said Indica....so we're going to find him some." Ford—who has never outed himself as a pot smoker despite Carrie Fisher doing so—scowled at this, but Glenn Close sitting next to him smiled beatifically. (Close puffed pot with her pals in "The Big Chill.")
The female nominees and winners were an interesting bunch, largely actresses like Kiera Knightley and Amy Adams starring in dark thrillers. The most interesting-sounding one, "The Substance," won Demi Moore the Globe for her performance as an aging actress taking a drug that turns her into a younger version of herself. Moore gave The Speech of the Night, relating that this was her first award after working for 45 years in the field, and being told she was merely a "popcorn actress."
Also nominated were Kate Winslet for "Lee," in which she portrays war photographer Lee Miller, who took Man Ray away from Kiki de Montparnasse, and Angelina Jolie for her hallucinatory portrayal of opera singer Maria Callas. Pam Anderson (appearing makeup-less) was nominated for "The Last Show Girl," for which Miley Cyrus's song "Beautiful That Way" was nominated. Best Song, and a Best Supporting Actress trophy, went to Zoe Saldana's work on "Emilia Pérez," about a south American drug lord who undergoes gender-affirming surgery. It was sweet to watch co-star and co-nominee Selena Gomez chant, "Zoe, Zoe, Zoe" before Saldana was announced as the acting winner. Accepting the Best Musical or Comedy Motion Picture prize, the movie's transgender star Karla Sofia Gascon gave a historic and moving speech.
Another winner was the Portuguese actress Fernanda Torres for "I'm Still Here," in which she portrays Eunice Paiva, a mother and activist coping with the forced disappearance of her dissident Brazilian politician husband, for which Frenchwoman Coralie Fargeat was nominated for Best Director. The only other female Best Director nominee was Payal Kapadia, the Indian writer and director of "All We Imagine As Light," about two Malayali nurses living together in Mumbai.
Adrien Brody won for "The Brutalist," a 3 1/2 hour movie about an architect who flees post-war Europe to live in the US, which also took Best Director and Best Drama Motion Picture. Also on the male side, Colin Farrell won for playing a comic-book character ("The Penguin") and Kieran Culkin won Best Supporting Actor for his role as a stoner in "A Real Pain," written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, who paired, and smoked, in Adventureland (2009) and American Ultra (2015) with Kristen Stewart. Culkin's"Succession" co-star Jeremy Strong was nominated for his pitch-perfect portrayal of Ray Cohn in "The Apprentice," Daniel Craig for "Queer," based on a William S. Burrows novel, and Timothée Chalamet for playing Bob Dylan in "A Complete Unknown" (in which Suze Rotolo is strangely fictionalized).
Ali Wong took the Best Stand Up Performance prize away from Glaser, Seth Rogen, and a few other men. Viola Davis got the Cecil B. De Mille Award, presented by her "Doubt" co-star Meryl Streep, but disappointingly, it wasn't presented during the telecast. Nor was Ted Danson's receipt of the Carol Burnett award.
With a dizzying number of costume changes, all fabulous, Glaser stopped herself from performing "Pope-ular," wearing Glinda's pink dress and magic wand from "Wicked" along with a pope's hat in homage to "Conclave." I suppose the Religious Right or Catholic church would have had a conniption fit had she continued, but I'd rather have seen the Martin Short treatment he performed in "We Need a New Prescription" on SNL ("Don't snort snow and don't smoke holly/ Here's my plan to make you jolly.")
During her hostess duties, Glaser admitted to having plastic surgery done, and
it's too bad that her great moment of fame came just as her face is
almost unrecognizable to me. I won't say it's the worst face job since
Matt Gaetz, because that's something she might say (and it isn't true).
Jean Smart, who again won a Globe for "Hacks,"
which also won the Best Television Series - Musical or Comedy prize,
ate some gummies on the show, but only for pain after she has plastic surgery.
Glaser—who has an off-again, on-again relationship with weed—does her homework, writing lots of jokes and trying them out in clubs before going onstage for her now-famous roasts. She read a series of jokes she didn't feel she could tell the crowd to their faces on the Howard Stern show the next day, and they all had Robin Quivers (and me) cracking up.
And Glaser
wasn't entirely kidding about Ozempic: The show was sponsored by Lilly, which got a
screen credit at the end of the night just before advertising its newly
approved obesity / sleep apnea drug Zepbound. The Ozempic theme song is to the tune of "It's Magic," but we know where the true magic does and doesn't lie.
ADDENDA: Culkin has been in the news since his win, after opening up to The
Guardian about the time he slipped a real joint onto the prop table
before Mark Ruffalo and an unnamed actress smoked it onstage. Ruffalo told the tale
(without naming Culkin, and pantomiming passing a joint to Nicki Minaj) on the Graham Norton show. After taking a big stage-sized hit,
"I thought, 'I'm really feeling it tonight!'" he said, adding that he got the best
reviews of his career that night. Although the audience gasped when
Ruffalo said the actress he passed the joint to onstage had never smoked pot,
Culkin told the Guardian she said, "Is this what being high is? This is
lovely," and co-star Phyllis Newman said, "I haven't smoked pot since the '60s.
Thank you, darling."
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler,
who hosted the Globes five years ago, also opened with a drug joke: Fey: "Those of you at home, I wish you could feel the excitement in this
room." Poehler: "You can smell the pills from here."
