We used two awards’ show moments as bookends. We opened with a clip of Amy Poehler standing in solidarity with her fellow nominees at the 2011 Emmys. We closed on an image of Poehler and Tina Fey, who were selected to host the 2013 Golden Globes. We wondered what it meant for the two actresses – who were part of a television moment that once again illustrated how they’ve made careers out of using comedy to negotiate feminism – to rush the stage in 2011 and (wo)man the podium in 2013. Was it a big deal for two women to host an awards show, a duty often bestowed upon their male contemporaries? Was it important that they follow in the footsteps of the co-creator of The Office who offended celebrities’ delicate sensibilities for three years? What kind of compromises would they make as hosts? Who was absent by virtue of their presence? Did it matter?

I think so. Fey and Poehler made clear in their opener at last night’s 70th Golden Globe Awards that they were going to keep the ceremony moving as they blithely delivered jokes about (and at) Ricky Gervais, Lena Dunham’s nudity, Daniel Day Lewis’ acting, Kathryn Bigelow’s marriage to James Cameron, Quentin Tarantino (eek!), Anne Hathaway (ouch), and their responsibilities as hosts (including having to go without pie for six weeks). If some considered this to be a tame outing for the pair, I was often unclear when Gervais was speaking truth to power and when he was just pleased with himself for being mean. Their routine lacked some of the feminist bite of their best work as Weekend Update anchors, but the women behind Liz Lemon and Leslie Knope make television out of picking your battles. Plus, I get a kick out of friends making each other laugh. For every moment they cracked themselves up, whether they were putting on false teeth and mustaches, holding hands expectantly with Jennifer Lopez, sitting on George Clooney’s lap, getting Glenn Close to play drunk, or chiding Dunham’s youth, I imagined them chuckling through rewrites, rehearsals, and late-night phone calls.

Some might be tempted to claim that the Golden Globes helped raise the banner for women. Not so fast. Jessica Chastain gave an empowered speech that compared her character in Zero Dark Thirty to its director, two women who let their work and not their gender speak for them. I was especially moved by Chastain’s willingness to gently challenge Bigelow by giving her credit for helping allow for a wider range of roles for women in the industry. But I have to pause at the thought that social progress might have anything to do with women enacting torture – a horrifying responsibility Claire Danes seemed to shrug off in her acceptance speech, which also nodded toward (certain) women’s increased visibility on the small screen.

“Funny to whom?” is a key question for Dunham’s rise. Girls is a promising comedy, but I don’t want to overburden the show with unearned societal import and want badly for other comedic voices to benefit from the platform Dunham has been given. The show caught flak for its invocation of a select identity group that isn’t totalizing for the many people who exist outside of it. Like many 26 year olds, Dunham is frustratingly inconsistent, responding to criticism against the show, its staff, and her own appeals to white privilege and hipster racism with apologies and correctives that waver between defensive, tongue-in-cheek, and humbled.

Dunham has always been ambivalent about Girls‘ scope. Her comedic sensibility is keyed into a distinct milieu. But during her first acceptance speech, she dedicated her win to “every woman who’s ever felt like there wasn’t a space for her.” This phrase stuck out, as Don Cheadle was the only person of color to win a Golden Globe this year. During the broadcast, Jamie Foxx presented Django Unchained, a film in which he played the title character, wasn’t nominated, and saw Tarantino and Christopher Waltz collect their awards and Leonardo DiCaprio get a nod. How white is that? Obviously, this isn’t Dunham’s fault. But she’s a recognized, powerful member of the industry now. I hope she works to find room for “every woman” in her own work and uses her influence to give the floor to them.

Jodie Foster answered the call to female empowerment with an ellipsis, a question mark, and the start of another sentence. The actress-director-Yale alumna almost came out, prompting Melissa Harris Perry to compare her Cecil B. DeMille acceptance speech to Hannah Arendt’s political theory. She implied that she came out a lifetime ago when she was a younger, more uncertain person. She made herself visible to people she knew off-camera and not to the millions watching at home. She thanked her former partner and their two sons. She insisted on her privacy, an intangible for a former child star. She may have also suggested that the necessity to come out in public reinforces heteronormativity. And, very tenderly, she said she loved her ailing mother. She also turned Honey Boo Boo into a straw man and expressed tenderness for Mel Gibson, which I cannot fathom. Slippery rhetoric aside, Foster made clear that her life is none of our business. It’s a contradictory statement to make when receiving a lifetime achievement award, yet a bold claim.

But her statement could still be turned into a (light) joke, because words are malleable. During their sign-off, Poehler told the crowd that she and Fey were going home with Foster. To start a Judith Butler reading group over cocktails? If only. To lobby for Mindy Kaling’s nomination next year? I hope so, and not in isolation. Some of us were on stage this year. Congratulations. What’s next?

The Golden Globe awards teeter precariously between two seemingly divergent roles within popular culture. On the one hand, NBC fosters the ceremony’s reputation as an anything-goes Hollywood celebrity bash as a means of stoking excitement and attracting viewer eyeballs. On the other hand, an ever-increasing attention to the Academy Awards race within major news outlets has afforded the Globes the faint aura of respectability–at least within the insular media-verse of awards prognosticating. Pundits feverishly parse the results of the ceremony, hoping to find within them premonitions of future Oscar gold. Both the glitter and the prestige only help the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), the organization of international entertainment journalists that hands out the Globes. Each year’s ceremony, then, becomes an exercise in balancing boozy celebrity hijinks and sober Tinseltown tributes. The Globes must be wacky enough to tune into on Sunday night, and respectable enough to be taken seriously on Monday morning.

Such a tightrope act was on full display this year. Ricky Gervais presided over the ceremony for the third consecutive year, riding the wave of tempest-in-a-teapot controversy over his “edgy” remarks from previous hosting gigs. The British comedian brings an intriguing note of grinning hostility to the proceedings. When Gervais asked presenter Johnny Depp whether the star had actually seen his own star vehicle The Tourist, it not only proved the perfect ego-deflator for Depp. It also handily lacerated the celebrity-whoring of the HFPA itself, which gave Depp and co-star Angelina Jolie a pair of please-come-to-the-ceremony nominations last year for the critically-lambasted film.

Still, Gervais might be getting a little too complacent in his provocateur-of-the-stars persona. At one point, he read aloud from a list of topics that the HFPA had banned, concluding with a tired pun about Jodie Foster’s film The Beaver. (Foster gamely gave a thumbs-up sign during the obligatory reaction shot.) Beyond its misfiring as humor, the moment underlined how much the Globes are banking on Gervais to bring the “crazy” quotient to a ceremony whose promises of spur-of-the-moment wackiness don’t always pan out. The show’s relatively-sedate tone made even a mildly-uncomfortable moment like Rob Lowe and Julianne Moore squirming through a Teleprompter mishap stand out. “This is why we love this evening!” Lowe offered limply.

Indeed, the most surprising bit of levity came in the middle of the most sincere moment of the telecast. Morgan Freeman received this year’s Cecil B. DeMille Award, a lifetime-achievement honor complete with heartfelt tributes from Helen Mirren and Sidney Poitier. Freeman’s acceptance speech proved appropriately classy and gracious, but the preceding clip reel included downright-nutty footage of the actor circa mid-1970s, as a singing vampire on the PBS children’s show The Electric Company. Rising out of a coffin filled with bubbly water, Freeman (sans shirt and sporting Dracula fangs) scrubs his back with a brush and sings about how he “loves to take a bath in a casket.” Its utterly oddball quality offered a welcome wrinkle in Freeman’s voice-of-God persona, and made for the most genuinely surprising–and instantly YouTube-able–moment of the evening.

As for its value as an awards harbinger, the Globes gave its usual hints as to which way the winds might be blowing come Oscar time, even as HFPA’s decision to split major film awards into separate categories for “drama” and “comedy or musical” offered enough ambiguity to keep the pundits chattering with uncertainty. The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius’ recreation of/homage to the silent-film era, picked up three awards, including Best Motion Picture Comedy or Musical. This would seem to cement the film’s sprint to the head of the awards pack. Still, Alexander Payne’s much-loved The Descendents scooped the Best Motion Picture Drama prize, as well as a Best Actor in a Drama award for George Clooney. Does it have the potential to upset? Similarly, Meryl Streep’s Best Actress in a Drama win for The Iron Lady all but sews up her long-awaited third Oscar…unless Michelle Williams sneaks in for her turn in My Week with Marilyn, which won her a Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical statuette.

Trying to be both free-wheeling Hollywood bash and serious Oscar precursor, the Globes can sometimes come off a generally muddled affair. Perhaps it’s best appreciated not in its fractured grand design, but in the little moments of glamour, sentiment, and surprise that inevitably bubble to the surface. So, in that spirit of appreciation, a few brief, final thoughts on this lovingly-glorified cocktail party of an awards show. Nice speech, Meryl. Great dress, Angelina. And Morgan, babe, any more of those vampire clips?

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.