Blending Genders, for Some Laughs at the Golden Globes

The British actress Emma Thompson tossed her shoes across the stage and slurped a martini, Dean Martin-style. Jennifer Lawrence wore her hair almost West Point short, while the actor Jared Leto and the composer Alex Ebert put up their flowing locks in loose chignons.

Diane Keaton wore a man’s tuxedo to accept Woody Allen’s lifetime achievement award. Even the annual Miss Golden Globe, Sosie Bacon, the daughter of Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, was nudged aside by a new feature, Mr. Golden Globe: Amy Poehler dressed as a sullen teenage boy.

It was a gender-bending Golden Globes, or at least, the hosts made an effort to celebrate gender equality.

Tina Fey and Ms. Poehler tried hard, and sometimes too hard, to top their first hosting job last year. It didn’t work so well when they aimed to be like the guys and go blue — their jokes about prosthetic penises fell flat. But they were better and very funny on the subject of women and Hollywood. They mocked George Clooney for dating younger women, describing his role as an astronaut in “Gravity” by saying that the actor “would rather float away into space and die than spend one more minute with a woman his own age.”

They quipped pointedly that Matthew McConaughey’s 45-pound weight loss for his role in “Dallas Buyers Club” was “what actresses call being in a movie.”