These jabs contributed to what James Poniewozik describes as an almost roast-like atmosphere to Gervais’ second hosting gig, wherein the awards and the people who worship them came under attack; while there may be some of us who feel bad for the celebrities who felt the sting of the host’s wrath, it’s hard to feel bad for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. They are Hollywood fetishists rather than Hollywood connoisseurs, enamored with the shiny and new, the star-studded, the zeitgeist-chasing, and whatever else will put together the most attractive, audience-drawing collection of people into the ballroom at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles.

Every year, the Golden Globes give us a large collection of reasons to dismiss them entirely. The Tourist and Burlesque are perhaps the two most prominent examples on the film side this year, and Piper Perabo’s Lead Actress in a Drama Series nomination for USA Network’s Covert Affairs offers a similar bit of lunacy on the television side. While these may lead us to dismiss the awards as a sort of farcical celebration of celebrity excess, the fact remains that the Golden Globes hold considerable power within the industry.

It is a power that is more political than creative, with the Globes serving as a primary election of sorts ahead of the real honors being bestowed at the Academy Awards next month. Despite reports of bribes, and the clear incongruence between the HFPA and prevailing notions of quality and taste in regards to certain nominees, the awards are placed in such a way that they take on importance regardless of their dubious nature. Their legitimacy stems from studios looking for a way to propel themselves to an Oscar, and thus the Golden Globes are provided legitimacy they have not earned so as to help facilitate certain films/performers in their efforts to gain the earned (albeit fallible) legitimacy of the Academy Awards five weeks later – it was here, for example, that Sandra Bullock began her run to Oscar just last year, and The Social Network certainly seems well on its way to Oscar success in light of its victories for Best Drama, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Original Score.

On the television side, however, there is no such linear notion of legitimacy for the HFPA to hang its hat on. The odd placement at the end of the calendar year differs from the Emmys’ adherence to the traditional September-May television season, and ends up creating races which could be completely different than the Emmys depending on how the Spring unfolds – the Emmys used to be given for the calendar years in the 1950s, but moved to the TV season after controversy surrounding Nanette Fabray winning an award for Caesar’s Hour in 1956 despite having left the show in the Spring of the previous year.

However, the legitimacy of the Golden Globes carries over from film to television thanks to the power of spectacle and their specific value to premium cable networks. In regards to spectacle, the awards offer an opportunity for networks to have their series featured alongside Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp, for their “television stars” to share screen time with real, live movie stars – it’s the kind of association that money can’t buy, and so from a purely promotional standpoint there is value in according a certain degree of legitimacy to the awards themselves so that the cast of Glee can all crowd onto the same stage as the cast of The Social Network.

For HBO and Showtime, meanwhile, that value is considerably higher. While broadcast and basic cable networks are looking for eyeballs, the premium cable outlets are looking for paying subscribers, and their substantial presence within the nominations is a key source of promotion. While this goes for all awards shows, with cable’s entry in the Emmys in the late 1980s helping to spark Cable’s expansion into original programming in the decades which followed, the Golden Globes are an outlet for Showtime and HBO to showcase the breadth of their lineups in order to convince viewers that there’s a reason to cough up $15 a month. Two wins for Boardwalk Empire, Best Drama Series and Best Actor in a Drama Series for Steve Buscemi, will certainly not hurt the chances of viewers considering picking up HBO in the near future, and Laura Linney’s victory for The Big C might make Globes viewers more likely to subcribe to Showtime when the series returns later this year.

In the end, though, the value of the Golden Globes very much depends on how we, as viewers, approach it. While it may carry certain weight for the studios and the networks, and the HFPA is not quite self-aware enough to realize that it isn’t just their host who considers them the butt of the joke, so long as viewers are aware of the artificial nature of its legitimacy it seems that there is a perverse pleasure in a celebration of all that is wrong with Hollywood.

And thus, perhaps, pleasure in watching Ricky Gervais call a spade a spade.

Among the many threads entwined in this production are its virtually fetishistic engagement with and display of early 20th century material culture, including forms of media. One scene finds Buscemi’s character in the company of a handful of other local bigshots, enjoying a hand-cranked bit of celluloid pornography, which catches on fire in the projector when the fellow at the crank tires out; other scenes present meditations on letters and postcards and the increasingly unfamiliar forms of time & space distanciation characteristic of “snail mail.” The sets and interactions captured in the program are crowded with objects of turn-of-the-century daily life. Reupholstered, refinished, renewed antique furniture populates cluttered sitting rooms; freshly tailored suits and dresses in century-old styles, curtains and lampshades, glossy vintage automobiles abound: objects reproduced or refurnished contribute to Boardwalk Empire’s Deadwood-style HBO hyperreality.

Some of the elements I’ve been finding most fascinating are the appearances and sounds of recorded music on spinning Victrolas and the lingering focus on one of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, The Road to Oz (1909). Ancient shellac 78s provide diegetic and non-diegetic music for numerous scenes; the Victrolas feature both as suppliers of musical sound and as big wooden obstacles navigated by the program’s cast as they move through the brocaded chambers. A scene takes place in an illegal casino housed in an H.H. Richardson-style brownstone, the camera placed such that the foreground is dominated by a table-top phonograph with the giant acoustic tone-arm caught fleck-fleck-fleck-ing in the locked end-groove. Thompson’s brother Eli, covering for the usual bag-man, enters to discover that he’s the victim of a robbery in progress, stalled in anticipation of his arrival; the phonograph needle’s repetitive circumnavigation of the disc’s matrix – and its foregrounded surface noise – a retrospective indicator that something’s going on here. The program’s modulation of the sound of the 78s’ surface noise, in both diegetic and non-diegetic aspects, appear as evidence of a conundrum: the surface noise is the accumulated wear that is probably an unavoidable dimension of any playback of a 90 year old analog recording, yet in the world of the program those recordings are new, or newish. What does this audible patina do here? The scuffs and wear on ninety-year-old furniture can be masked and polished; ancient platters can be digitized and manipulated; but the sounds of age in these records contribute to Boardwalk Empire’s construction of a hyperreal 1920 Atlantic City.

Baum’s The Road to Oz appears late in season 1, when Margaret Schroeder, widowed consort of Enoch Thompson, ensconced in a luxury suite at Thompson’s expense, is shown reading the book aloud to her two children. At this point in the series, Thompson has become a target of Arnold Rothstein’s thugs, and Richard Harrow, a grossly disfigured veteran, is installed in the suite to protect the family. The children are repulsed by Harrow’s appearance – half his face is missing and is ordinarily covered by a painted tin mask a la Phantom of the Opera – but when he makes a joke about being the tin man, they warm up to him. The camera soon finds the quartet happily settled on the couch, united through Baum’s fantastic narrative. But it’s the book itself that stands out here. Again, among the refurbished/reproduced, new-looking furnishings, a strangely aged, out-of-place first edition emerges briefly and we are shown John R. Neill’s starkly graceful, understated rendering of the Tin Man. “I was very happy among the Munchkins and Winkies and Quadlings and Gillikens…” Schroeder reads to her two children and the family’s bodyguard, as sense of homey peace settles around the threatened domestic scene.

In my perception of the program, these media artifacts draw attention to themselves; they stand out like sore thumbs in Boardwalk Empire’s recreated 1920s East Coast interiors. Their incongruity – obviously worn, ninety-year-old media amidst polished surfaces, carefully reupholstered furniture, freshly tailored vintage clothing, and reproduction Edison lamp bulbs – makes me wonder: what is it about these media objects that exempts them from reproduction? Why go to such trouble to make everything else look freshly made for sale in the second decade of the 20th century, but include these palimpsests of uncountable readings and listenings in their aged, scuffed, dried-out, intimately savored forms? What does the apparent “authenticity” of these reverse time-travelers do for the program’s producers? For its viewers? The expressions fixed in this book and these records exist virtually and could be freshly reproduced at, I’m guessing, little added cost. Why haul out and dust off these bits of bygone media, these pictures of Dorian Gray?