Word: borat
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...award for Best Acceptance Speech goes, ex aequo, to two Cambridge grads. Baron Cohen simultaneously raised the bar for gross-out verbal art and the hackles of NBC censors when he said that, in making Borat, "I saw some dark parts of America, an ugly side of America... I refer of course to the anus and testicles of my costar Ken Davitian. Ken, when I was in that scene and I... saw your two wrinkled golden globes on my chin, I thought to myself, I better win a bloody award for this." He then described, in awesome olfactory detail...
...Best Actress category, "There are a lot of Dames out there." Mirren snagged two of the awards, for impersonating Elizabeth I (in Elizabeth I) on the small screen and her namesake (in The Queen) on the big one. Sacha Baron Cohen took Best Actor (Musical or Comedy) for Borat, and Hugh Laurie, Bill Nighy, Jeremy Irons and Emily Blunt won statuettes in the TV categories...
...plug but rhymed it with Oliver; Barrymore botched composer Alexandre Desplat's name badly enough when announcing the Best Score category that co-presenter Hugh Grant snatched away the winner's card with Desplat's name, saying, "Yeah, it's in French." Remarkably, everyone could pronounce that Kazakh fellow Borat's name just fine...
...tempting to read Borat's unmolested season on Lebanese screens as a sign of progress of the post-Syrian era towards a more tolerant, liberal society. But it could just as likely be the high water mark in a Weimar-like interregnum before the forces of reaction and intolerance reassert themselves. Outside of the theaters, Lebanese society is in the midst of a sense of humor failure. When a Lebanese television comedy show poked fun at Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah last year, his followers rioted, cutting off the road from Beirut airport. And with Hizballah firmly ensconced in central Beirut...
...Instead, Borat's equal-opportunity offensiveness is on par with so much else that the U.S. exports to the Middle East - it represents freedom without responsibility. As one Lebanese film critic said after seeing the movie: "The real message of Borat is that America is ridiculous." But people in the Middle East don't need to go to the movies to learn that...