British journalist Toby Young has made a living out of being irrationally angry at life. Did you realize that he worked at Vanity Fair for just six months before Graydon Carter fired him and he turned the brief experience into a snarky tell-all? As he’s always referenced as a former VF staffer, we’d always assumed he’d been there longer than that, but as Carter drolly quipped to the LA Times, “I can only compare it with a brief one-night stand that results in octuplets.” Young’s latest rant, a piece in The Independent that rails against the Golden Globes, is nothing out of the ordinary for him, but no less silly.
Why get so frothy over an awards ceremony that so many others have already discounted? It’s too easy of a target. And if you are British, and it is likely “a vintage year for the Brits, with likely winners including Kate Winslet, Hugh Laurie, Sally Hawkins, the director Danny Boyle and the screenwriter Simon Beaufoy,” why pick now to make a fuss about what a “hack” Hollywood institution it is?
Young’s problem seems to be with the fact that previous winners bought off industry voters with gifts, but he states in his opening paragraph that winning will be a shoe-in for a laundry list of his talented countrymen. So why so angry? Is it just a case of rage for rage’s sake? Maybe he just needs a good hug. Or a spanking.