The Golden Globes: was the Foreign Press right about anything? 

This Sunday was the last Sunday of regular season NFL and the first Sunday of Hollywood award season. The Golden Globes awards achievement in film and television and for the first time in its history is owned by the American production company, Dick Clark Productions and was aired live on CBS (right after the last Sunday Night Football game). While the show is under new ownership, the voting body is still the Hollywood Foreign press pool. The voting body is made up of over 300 people from 76 different countries including Cuba, Cameroon and Serbia.

So what did they get right and what did they get wrong? 

Globes got it right: Celebration of Oppenheimer 

Christopher Nolan has been routinely slighted from major awards primarily because audiences have the audacity to enjoy his movies. This is Nolan’s first ever Golden Globe despite works of genius like Inception (which he also wrote) and Dark Night and Dunkirk. Oppenheimer was on a different plane then any of the other nominees this year and it managed a major box office haul. The Globes may be finally realizing you can entertain audiences (who finance the whole industry) and make high quality art. 

Oppenheimer won: Best Drama Motion Picture, Best Actor in a Drama Motion Picture (Cillian Murphy), Best Supporting Actor (Robert Downey Jr.), Best Director (Christopher Nolan), and Best Original Score (Ludwig Göransson). 

Globes got it wrong: celebration of The Bear as a COMEDY

The Bear is a phenomenal show in it’s second season which was better than it’s first. It won for Best Male Actor in a Musical/Comedy series (Jeremy Allen White), Best Female Actor in a Musical/Comedy series (Ayo Edebiri) and Best Musical/Comedy Series. 

The problem? It’s not a comedy. It is very distinctly a high tension drama series. If it is at all a comedy it is only simply in such that life, in all it’s dramatic twists and turns, can still have a sense of irony. The Bear is a 90-10 drama-comedy if it is at all comedy. So to nominate it in the comedy category is really just a cheap way for the Globes to award the show (a critical favorite) without putting it in the far more competitive dramatic category against final season goliaths like Succession who would have absolutely beat The Bear in all the categories where it won.

Personally, I love The Bear. But I think comedies are difficult. Humor is an extremely hard and undersung form of art. Nominating and then awarding dramas in the comedy category is a good way to simply ignore the contribution laughter has on art and on the film medium. 

The Globes got it right: New categories celebrating consumers

The Golden Globes added two categories this year which pay due respect to movie goes and screen consumers across America. The categories are: Best Stand-Up Comedy Performance on television and Best Box-Office Achievement. Ricky Gervais won for Stand-Up and Barbie (who grossed $1.4 billion world wide and caused a sensation of themed dress-up screenings in theaters everywhere) won for Box-Office Achievement. 

Considering that audiences are the true financial backers of the film and television industry, it’s about time that a mainstream A-List award ceremony recognizes categories which celebrate viewer financial contribution and viewer favorites. 

Additionally, adding these categories expanded the Golden Globe invite list to include more relevant, younger celebrities and stars. For example, Taylor Swift was nominated for her Era’s tour movie concert which made $260 million in domestic theaters (the highest grossing concert movie ever) for Box-Office achievement and therefore attended the event when she would not have otherwise. Her attendance increased viewership of other popular shows (like Chiefs games like it or not) and the Globes is wise to try and loop in popular celebrities to get higher ratings on their live ceremony. 

The Globes got it wrong: Jo Koy/the entire production 

Unfortunately Jo Koy’s monologue was not well received. There was nothing offensive or bad about it, it simply wasn’t very funny (it seemed more like a timing issue than a joke issue). He knew he was bombing and even tried to make excuses from the stage (painful). In general, the entire “show” was pretty lackluster. Sometimes the presenters were given jokes and a real presentation and other times they just read a very perfunctory script. There was very little life to the show whatsoever and certainly not very much fun. The most they could scrape up was fake controversy when Koy told a joke about Taylor Swift and she took a drink of her champagne instead of laughing. The media would have you believe she was bent out of shape but frankly I don’t think she knew he was even telling a joke (it was often hard to tell).

It’s a tough rope to walk because award shows of its kind already get a lot of flack for how long they run. Cutting performances and dialogue helps keep the show moving. But cutting all of it made the show itself pretty bland. 

Next up in the awards season line up will be: the Critics Choice Awards on January 14. Let’s see if the domestic critics get more right than the foreign critics.