81st Golden Globe Awards (Hollywood Foreign Press Association, CBS-TV, aired January 7, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, January 7) I watched the 81st Golden Globe Awards – they carefully avoided using the word “Annual” since there hadn’t been one last year, mainly due to a largely manufactured controversy over the alleged lack of “diversity” in the membership of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which runs the Golden Globes; NBC canceled their TV contract but in the year of the likely Trump restoration, CBS picked them up. The host was Jo Koy, a 52-year-old half-white, half-Filipino actor and comedian who took the gig after several bigger names were offered it and turned it down. The Golden Globes show was the usual lumbering beast awards shows are, though Koy’s opening monologue had at least one good like satirizing Hollywood’s attempts at “authenticity”; he said that among the delicacies served at the event were sushi, and he added, “That’s not us! We’re Filipinos! We cook our fish!” The mania for authenticity and political correctness was reflected in the sheer length of the awards categories; with the word “actress” now considered sexist (a criticism I have some sympathy for; after all, we no longer call a woman who writes books an “authoress” or a woman who flies planes an “aviatrix”) the acting categories now are called “male actor” and “female actor.” The Globes also suffer from their attempt to award honors in the entire universe of motion picture entertainment but separate out the worlds of theatrical film and television – when much of the most interesting and provocative moviemaking today is done for TV, albeit mostly for “streaming” services (which means I probably won’t get to see any of it because I don’t “stream” except occasionally on PBS or YouTube; my husband Charles and I have Amazon Prime but we can only watch it on our computer because our TV is too old to receive it directly). I took notes on the various categories and who won what, and it was hard for me to keep up – I kept running to my computer to look things up on imdb.com – at least partly because many of the awardees also had mile-long names.

The very first awardee of the night was a heavy-set Black woman named Da’vine Joy Randolph, for her role in The Holdovers, an odd comedy about a group of people left behind in a boarding school during the holiday break and Paul Giamatti (who also won) as the teacher who himself has to stay behind and supervise them. Next was Robert Downey, Jr. for his supporting role in Oppenheimer as Lewis Strauss (though at least one awards presenter got the first name of his character wrong and called him “Leonard Strauss”), the horrible real-life head of the Atomic Energy Commission who led the effort to disgrace J. Robert Oppenheimer by denying him his security clearance. The leading movies in terms of nominations were, predictably, Oppenheimer and Barbie, but neither swept their categories. Though the Golden Globes divide both movies and TV shows into “Drama” and “Comedy or Musical” categories (and further subdivide the TV realm into “Limited Series, Anthology Series or Movie for TV” and what used to be ordinary TV series), and therefore could have given both Oppenheimer and Barbie the big awards, they didn’t. Oppenheimer won for Best Motion Picture-Drama (and its writer-director, Christopher Nolan, won for directing but not writing), but Barbie lost the Best Motion Picture-Comedy or Musical award to a British film called Poor Things, whose producer/star, Emma Stone, also beat out Barbie’s star, Margot Robbie, for Best Actress – oops, I mean Best Female Actor – In a Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical. The online synopsis for Poor Things from imdb.com reads, “From filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and producer Emma Stone comes the incredible tale and fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter (Stone), a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Under Baxter's protection, Bella is eager to learn. Hungry for the worldliness she is lacking, Bella runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a slick and debauched lawyer, on a whirlwind adventure across the continents. Free from the prejudices of her times, Bella grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation.”

Instead Barbie was the first-ever winner in a preposterous new category called “Cinematic and Box-Office Achievement,” which seems to have been the Globes’ answer to the briefly considered but ultimately rejected Academy Award for “Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film.” When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences floated this category and then stepped back from it due to overwhelming opposition from Hollywood’s creative community, I thought the Academy should have gone back to what they did in the very first year of the Oscars: split the Best Picture category into “Best Production” and “Most Artistic Quality of Production.” That way they could give “Best Production” to a big commercial blockbuster whose nomination would draw TV viewers to the awards show, while they could give “Most Artistic Quality of Production” to the independent films they’ve taken to heart and given the Best Picture nod to in recent years. I’m still smarting over the Academy’s decision to give Green Book Best Picture for 2018 over Black Panther, not only because Black Panther was a huge commercial success but also because it was a much better film. The award also showcased how Hollywood isn’t as anti-racist as it likes to pretend; they gave Best Picture to yet another movie with the tiresome cliché of the Black characters being there only morally to redeem the white ones instead of one in which the Black characters are independent, forceful, multidimensional and self-actualizing. More recently I’ve read screenwriter Paul Schrader’s intriguing criticism of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon for casting Leonardo di Caprio as the white guy who marries the Native girl as part of a plot by his father to murder her whole family to gain her inheritance, instead of the FBI agent who got wind of the plot and solved the case. Scorsese said the reason he did that was because he realized Killers of the Flower Moon was turning into a Native version of Mississippi Burning, with the white FBI guys the heroes, and he wanted to rewrite the script to keep the focus on the Native characters instead. Good for you, Martin! Killers of the Flower Moon actually won a Golden Globe; Lily Gladstone, playing the Native woman who marries di Caprio’s white character and then refuses to believe he’s really part of a plot to kill her and her entire family, won “Best Female Actor, Motion Picture, Drama.”

Anyway, getting back to the Golden Globes, the TV categories were dominated by two miniseries: Succession, the thinly veiled story of the Redstones or the Murdochs (a dying media mogul puts his kids through a series of humiliating rituals to decide which one is vicious and unscrupulous enough to inherit the empire), and Beef (which I’d never heard of before), described on imdb.com as, “After an incident in a parking lot, road rage ensues resulting in a bitter feud between the two antagonists. The vendetta between them and the lengths they'll go to to avenge themselves on the other spirals out of control, jeopardizing everything and everyone in their lives.” Beef creator Lee Sung Jin won the award for Best Limited Series, Anthology Series or Movie for Television and said a real-life road-rage incident that happened to him inspired the show. His stars, Steven Yeun and Ali Wong, also won. Other surprise winners included the French film Anatomy of a Fall, described on imdb.com as, “A woman is suspected of her husband's murder, and their blind son faces a moral dilemma as the main witness.” It not only won the award for Best Non-English Film (beating out entries from two English-speaking countries, Britain and the U.S., which were shot in other languages) but co-writers Justine Triet (who also directed) and Arthur Harari won the award for best screenplay (beating out predicted winner Christopher Nolan, who wrote as well as directed Oppenheimer). The animated film award went to the Japanese movie The Boy and the Heron – which pleased me because it was one of only two nominations in traditional drawn animation instead of that horrible neither-fish-nor-fowl technology of computer animation – and the Best Female Actor, Television award went to Elizabeth Debicki for playing the late Princess Diana Spencer Windsor in The Crown, which otherwise went unawarded.

There was also another new award presented for the best stand-up comedy show, won by former Golden Globes host Ricky Gervais for a TV special called Armageddon, though frankly I’d have wanted to see Wanda Sykes win, if only because the clip from her show had some political humor in it! It was the year Gervais hosted that the Golden Globes acquired such a reputation for raunchiness that this year Jo Koy joked in his monologue that the censors were at the ready with the “bleep” button – though instead of actually bleeping anything there was just a moment (or more) of silence to indicate the on-screen talent was saying something censorable according to the ultra-Puritan codes that still rule American television. I remember the year the Canadian TV show Schitt’s Creek was up for several awards (and won most of them), in which the network’s “Programming Standards” department (i.e., the censors) demanded that the show’s logo appear on screen every time someone spoke the title so viewers could rest assured that the reference wasn’t to the good old Anglo-Saxon term for human excrement.