The Golden Globe voters ain't a brain trust. They're just the foreign journalists who got the not-so-plum assignment of the Hollywood beat. I say not-so-plum because foreign countries don't have the same mania for movie news that we do in the USA. For all we know, those 90 voters include the cultural editor in some not-widely circulated rag in Trinidad or Chad.
Even a cursory glance over the link der Brucer provided earlier shows that the membership of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is composed of reporters (if oft'times part-time) from nations that have their own film industries. Twelve come from Germany, six represent Great Britain, and France has seven. I don’t think there is a country represented by their membership that hasn’t at least once been nominated for Best Foreign Film by AMPAS.
The foreign audience is a major source of income for the American film industry. Even as far back as WWII, the loss of that income almost bankrupted Disney. It is even more valuable today, with films such as
Titanic leading the box office in countries such as Japan (only topped by
Spirited Away within that film’s own country of origin). And the market for pirated DVDs is far more volatile internationally than it is in the USA, in spite of the AMPAS attempts to prove they’re “doing something about the problem” by trying to ban screeners locally.
Even in the small, underdeveloped nations, the film industry has an impact, if only in an ancillary way. There are many countries that supplement their income through the sale of postage stamps, and the inclusion of Hollywood icons and stars in the imagery on those stamps. These countries certainly aren’t selling all of their stamps within their own borders.
As for the HFPA, they also add to the economies of the countries the journalists represent. Take, for example, the number of celebrities that do not endorse products here in the USA, but receive large fees for their doing the exact same thing in other nations. If the income received by the firms hiring the celebrities was not magnitudes larger than the cost of hiring the celebrities, they would not keep up this practice. This doesn't even begin to account for the licencing of the films and products internationally, and how these boost the local economies. Keeping the celebrities, and the films they appear in, in the spotlight in the international press is the job of the HFPA membership.
