83rd Annual Golden Globe Awards (Dick Clark Productions, Penske Media Group, Golden Globes, White Cherry Entertainment, aired January 11, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Sunday, January 11) I watched the CBS-TV telecast of the 83rd annual Golden Globe Awards. It was the usual lumbering beast these sorts of spectacles generally are, and there wasn’t much of the comic banter that has livened up previous years’ telecasts. The host was Nikki Glaser, repeating from the 2025 telecast after the awards weren’t televised at all in 2024. The telecast featured so many winners from “streaming” services I was tempted to joke that the real winner last night was Netflix, which is in the middle of a multi-billion dollar attempt to buy Warner Bros. Discovery that was the subject of a few jokes, notably one made by Glaser that the bidding for Warner Bros. would start at $5. Most of the movies that won were made for “streaming” services, as were virtually all the TV shows: good luck being able to watch any of this stuff if you’re a diehard like me clinging to an increasingly expensive cable TV connection and fiercely resisting the curse of “streaming.” The advent of “streaming” has wrecked all the models people of my generation (I’m 72) are used to in getting either audio or audio-visual entertainment. I’ve just read an article in The Week magazine that said filmmakers are worried about the implications of a Warners sale to Netflix because the current Netflix management is not only uninterested in but downright hostile to theatrical distribution. (A number of the movie winners pleaded with people to see their films in actual theatres, on big screens with other people in the audience, instead of waiting for them to “stream.”) “Streaming” has also almost totally destroyed the DVD market, much to my chagrin, even though I can see one good thing about it: I remember when I was trying to explain “streaming” to our (late) friend Garry Hobbs. He said he couldn’t understand why people would want to “stream” a movie instead of owning a copy they could watch anytime, and I just waved my hand at the stacks of DVD’s taking up what used to be our coffee table and said, “It’s because they don’t want their living rooms to end up looking like this!” I also find myself oddly bothered by the designation of the awards for acting as by “male actor” and “female actor.” I understand the P.C. reasons they’ve done that, and in a certain way it makes sense – after all, we no longer call a woman who writes books an “authoress” or a woman who flies planes an “aviatrix” – but I’m still old-school enough to miss the term “actress.” (Will the name of the classic 1953 film with Spencer Tracy and Ruth Gordon have to be changed from The Actress to The Female Actor?)

The Golden Globes gives out multiple Best Picture winners, including one for Drama and one for Musical or Comedy, though sometimes the lines get blurred. Chloë Zhao’s Hamnet, a slightly fact-based biopic of William Shakespeare and his marriage (for some reason Shakespeare’s wife, who in real life was named Anne Hathaway, is called “Agnes” in the movie), won Best Motion Picture (Drama), while a “streaming” movie called One Battle After Another, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, won Best Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy), and Anderson won for Best Director and also Best Writer. (Those awards don’t appear to have been bifurcated the way the Best Picture and the acting awards were between dramas and musicals or comedies.) The Best Motion Picture (Animated) award went to K-Pop Demon Hunters, which sounds absolutely ghastly to me (and it doesn’t help that it’s in that horrible, blocky computer-animated style; I really don’t like computer animation, though there’ve been a few films, like Ratatouille and Soul, where the writing and voice acting were strong enough to overcome my basic distaste for the technique). The Best Motion Picture (Non-English Language) award went to a Brazilian film called The Secret Agent (not based on the 19th century Joseph Conrad novel which Alfred Hitchcock modernized and filmed as Sabotage in 1936, but a new tale set in 1977 in which a fugitive scientist returns to his home town of Recife; though I don’t know for sure, it seems likely this is the first Non-English Language movie winner to be in Portuguese). Hamnet star Jessie Buckley also won the “Best Female Actor, Motion Picture (Drama)” award for playing “Agnes,”a.k.a. Mrs. William Shakespeare. The Secret Agent’s Wagner Moura won “Best Male Actor, Motion Picture (Drama),” beating out (among other people) Michael B. Jordan as twin blues musicians in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. (I’m willing to watch just about anything made by Ryan Coogler; I think he’s one of the most amazing filmmakers working today, and he even got me to watch Creed, his regrettable contribution to the Rocky franchise, and actually enjoy it other than having to put up with Sylvester Stallone.) Sinners did win for an odd category called “Box Office and Cinematic Achievement,” which appears to be the Globes doing what the Academy Awards briefly considered, creating an award for “Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film” until they backed off due to howls of derision from the movie community. (I’d still like to see the Academy go back to the split award they did the first year, honoring William Wellman’s Wings as “Best Production” and Friedrich Murnau’s Sunrise for “Most Artistic Quality of Production.” That way they could give awards both to nice little independent films and big blockbuster movies mass audiences actually go to see.)

The acting awards went to Timothée Chalamet (male) for Marty Supreme – in his acceptance speech he joked about having had to bulk up to play a ping-pong player – and Rose Byrne (female) for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. I’d guessed that was a film about a disabled woman, but no-o-o-o-o; it’s described on imdb.com as, “While trying to manage her own life and career, a woman on the verge of a breakdown must cope with her daughter's illness, an absent husband, a missing person, and an unusual relationship with her therapist.” The Supporting Actor performance awards went to Stellan Skarsgård (male, and father of those Skarsgårds) for a Norwegian film called Sentimental Value (though Skarsgård himself is Swedish), whose Norwegian title was Affeksjonsverdi; Skarsgård plays a father who reconciles with his two estranged daughters. The female Supporting Actor award went to Black actress (there, I used the word) Teyana Taylor for a role in One Battle After Another, and she gave the usual plaint about being glad she could finally offer movie audiences a role that looked like her. (Well, who else would she look like? I know what she meant: she felt privileged to offer movie audiences a strong African-American character.) The Best Original Song award went to “Golden” from K-POP Demon Hunters, and though she said she’d promised not to sing on the show Nikki Glaser did a quite funny parody of it. (I’d probably have liked it even better if I’d known the original.) The TV awards were less interesting to me because virtually all the shows were on “streaming” services and therefore I shall never be able to watch them; a medical show called The Pitt won for best TV series (drama), and the Hollywood spoof The Studio won for best TV series (comedy). The makers of The Studio joked about having just made an episode spoofing the Golden Globes, and now here they were accepting an award at the real ones! The award for “Best Limited Series, Anthology Series, or Motion Picture Made for Television” (whew, that was a mouthful of a category name!) went to a British mini-series called Adolescence, described on imdb.com as, “A thirteen-year-old boy, Jamie Miller, is arrested for the brutal murder of a schoolgirl. To his family this all seems like a huge mistake – surely Jamie would not do something like that? To the police the evidence is clear, but what motive could he possibly have?”

The male lead, 17-year-old Owen Cooper, won an acting award. Also awarded for Adolescence were Stephen Graham for playing Cooper’s father and Erin Doherty for playing Briony Ariston, though none of the online sources I’ve seen offer any clue as to just how she fits in with the story. Noah Wyle won the Best Male Actor in a TV Series award for The Pitt, and the Best Female Actor was Rhea Seehorn for a show called Pluribus, whose premise sounds quite interesting: “In a world overtaken by a mysterious wave of forced happiness, Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), one of the immune few, must uncover what's really going on – and save humanity from its artificial bliss.” Ricky Gervais, who used to host the Golden Globes until the organizers got tired of the controversy he used to engender with his insults, won for Best Stand-Up Comedy Special even though he was the only one of the nominees who didn’t show up for the ceremony. A new award for Best Podcast (pardon me while I go barf) went to Amy Poehler for something called Good Hang. I’m actually getting bored writing about the Golden Globes, especially since the awards all went to movies I haven’t seen and probably will never get to see because the “streaming” revolution has so totally upended just about every way I once had of watching current movies and TV shows (and the closure of San Diego’s Landmark chain of art-house cinemas hasn’t helped either). One oddity about this year’s Golden Globes telecast was the weird ambiguity about just who votes on them; previous years proudly proclaimed the awards as coming from the “Hollywood Foreign Press Association,” a group whose qualifications were allegedly so loose you could get it if you’d ever published one article about movies in a newspaper or magazine outside the United States. But this year the awards voters were described far more nebulously than that and the show gave no idea as to just who decides who gets the Golden Globes.