For years, the Golden Globes were the tipsy cousin of awards shows. You’d see them for a few hours once a yr, they’d get a little too drunk and a little too loud, but they never overstayed their welcome, and also you’d go home with a good story if nothing else. But after it emerged in 2021 that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association was allegedly corrupt and racist in addition to the goal of frequent and sometimes deserved mockery, the organization vowed to reform each its membership and its ways. (The HFPA was officially dissolved last yr, although several winners finally night’s awards thanked the group anyway.) Sunday’s broadcast was meant to be the debut of the recent, improved Globes, and while they may have been marginally more respectable, they were also something the show’s former incarnation never was: boring.
Comedian Jo Koy, who hosted the ceremony, may be quantitatively more famous than last yr’s host, Jerrod Carmichael—Koy sold out Madison Square Garden just last November—but he felt painfully misplaced in front of the high-powered crowd, digging himself into an instantaneous hole with feeble gags about Barbie’s boobs and the way Kevin Costner actually showed up this yr. Joke after joke fell flat, a lot in order that Koy was forced to acknowledge, in the middle of his opening monologue, that he was bombing. When he later tried out a we’re-all-pals-here line about how the broadcast featured fewer shots of Taylor Swift than the average NFL game, Swift stayed tight-lipped and coolly sipped her wine. (Making matters worse, Swift visibly roared when Jim Gaffigan, introducing the recent award for best standup comedy special, joked that after 80 years of celebrating Hollywood stars, “you guys finally decided to invite the talented people.”) Reporter Nicole Sperling said she’d “never seen an audience rebel against an emcee so quickly.”
If the host sets the tone for the evening, then this evening’s tone was “flop sweat.” Mark Hamill, tapped to inaugurate the Globes’ recent awards for Cinematic and Box Office Achievement (i.e., Best Picture That Actually Made Money), joked that it was “the only awards show with an open bar.” But the presenters and winners alike seemed almost uniformly sober, depriving the broadcast of the off-the-cuff moments which have often been its most memorable. I couldn’t inform you who won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture—Musical or Comedy last yr, but I’ll always remember Christine Lahti apologizing for being late to just accept her award in 1998 because she was still in the bathroom when her name was called.
With a handful of exceptions, the Globes’ presenting duos seemed ill-matched and under-rehearsed, their attempted banter built around comic discomfort that usually just played as real awkwardness. In one scripted exchange, Costner quoted a couple of lines from America Ferrera’s climactic monologue in Barbie, and an awestruck Ferrera gushed, “Did you, Kevin Costner, memorize my womanhood speech from Barbie?” Costner held back his curt “no” for thus long that it felt less like a punchline than a slap.
There were a handful of noteworthy moments in the early going, namely Succession’s Kieran Culkin using a portion of his acceptance speech for best actor to take a playful stab at a fellow HBO nominee, The Last of Us’ Pedro Pascal: “Suck it, Pedro.” But it wasn’t until Andra Day and Jon Batiste took the small, circular stage to present the awards for songwriting and rating that things finally began to loosen up. Day did a double take at the teleprompter copy about her getting her start “singing in a strip … mall,” and Batiste chewed gum and shot the camera a sly smile as if he, no less than, had managed to locate the open bar. Even so, when Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig made their way out, I used to be still dreading the possibility that even this venerable comic duo might fall on their faces, so off were the vibes. Fortunately, they managed a decent if not world-changing bit involving their involuntarily dancing to a goofy piece of music, and the evening was saved from total disaster.
In the end, the presumptive Oscar front-runner Oppenheimer cleaned up with five awards, including picture, director, actor, supporting actor, and rating. On the TV side, it was a good night for each Beef and The Beef, with The Bear tying Beef’s three wins, while Succession’s final season won 4. Surprises were minor, each in terms of who won and what they said. I saw more clips on my timeline of Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner canoodling in the audience than I did of anything that happened onstage.
Why even watch the Golden Globes? Because, as silly and irrelevant as they’re, even with the worst show—and this was, to be clear, one among, if not the, worst in recent memory—you continue to get moments like Killers of the Flower Moon’s Lily Gladstone accepting her award for Best Actress in a Drama, marking the historic significance of her win by starting her speech in the language of the Blackfeet tribe. Among other things, the Globes have often served as a sort of audition for Oscar night, and Gladstone’s moving acceptance was one academy voters might well wish to see repeated in person.
Whatever the changes behind the scenes, the winners of the Globes’ brand-new awards proved that there’s still a long option to go for the organization to regain—or, really, gain—its credibility. Debuting an award for “box office achievement” feels redundant in a yr when the box-office champs were also critical favorites. Barbie, the box-office award winner, didn’t need a made-up category to earn recognition, and Oppenheimer, which won the regular old Best Picture, Drama, earned nearly $1 billion by itself. The standup category was a straight-up embarrassment, with former Globes host and current transphobe Ricky Gervais emerging victorious from a pool of big-name but largely past-their-prime comics. If that was the Golden Globes’ attempt to indicate that they’ll change with the times, it landed with a larger thud than Jo Koy’s played-out jabs about the lengthy running time of Oppenheimer. Better luck next yr.
Credit : slate.com
