Francisco Goya

Unsuccessful Copycat...

The stage was all set for the Awards, we just had a couple of hours to wait....

Although slightly hangovered after a night dedicated to erasing from his brain the Reds' defeat against the Greens, this blogger of yours went to the Goyas gala out of a sense of duty towards the Honourable Reader.

The invitations mentioned 8.oo PM, and out of Old Europe punctuality Behemotchka and I were there at eight alright. We were then told that in fact the live-on-TV ceremony was about to begin at Ten!. With sub-zero temperatures outside, a congress hall in the middle of f"&%$& nowhere and no bar functioning inside the hall, one can be excused for this urge to trash the Goyas night comprehensively.

It felt like the Moscow Film Festival.. the same provincial trying-too-hard to mimic the Oscars attitude. The same evening dresses in cheap materials and the sad petty bourgeois atmosphere of Hola! readers or BigBrother fans. Pity, really, because the Spanish cinema is in quite good shape and they have a real industry going on here. If only they could relax on the Frenchy-inspired sniping at the Hollywood model in the name of culturally exceptional European cinema (while at the same time bursting with pride at the Hollywood careers of Antonio and Penelope or Paz). If only they could have found the inspiration to serve us a b*&$%! drink while there's still one and a half hours to go and it's snowing outside!

A feature of these events I still cannot grasp is the astronomic cost of prime time advertising on the TV channel broadcasting the show ( almost as expensive per minute as airplane gasoline) while at the same time large periods, full five to eight minutes, are wasted by presenters in hastily scripted supposedly entertaining lines in between "and the winner is" moments. I guess the edited pre-recorded version might work but live the logistical hiccups and slow-mo boring stuff (including self-congratulatory corporative speeches) is unbearable.

We left after the first block of awards, longing for the boletus I had left marinating in cognac.. The snow-covered suburb was indeed awesome to watch..

The only bright exception to an otherwise disastrous Sunday evening was the daring pink dress of the Lady Minister for Culture, from Agatha Ruiz de La Prada..