The Golden Globes were a complete and total embarrassment. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying this as a stuffy, sanctimonious believer that awards are things only legitimately bestowed upon artists by academies and properly credentialed critics groups. The “legitimacy” of any group to hand out trophies is more or less in the eye of the beholder. But once they are rolling, you can judge them by how seriously they take their project. Last week, I spent hours on the phone with a reporter from outside Hollywood who was genuinely trying to understand concerns about the Golden Globes. We went around in circles as she asked repeatedly: Aren’t all these shows a bit of a joke? Every molecule of my body longed to agree with that… to just say, “Yes! It’s all a big silly joke! Who indeed, does care if the Golden Globes are corrupt and ridiculous? Let’s just see some stars in nice clothes crying when they accept prizes and not strain ourselves making too much of this.” But, but, but….
Watching the show last night had the ironic effect, in its awfulness, of reminding me why this whole thing matters, as silly as that sounds. Film, as you may have heard, is under assault at this moment. It’s not too much to say that the medium’s survival as an industrial project hangs in the balance. And it’s not just film. TV isn’t in quite as desperate financial straits, but the threats to it come from the same place and could ultimately be just as deadly. I heard two of the most celebrated financial analysts the other week argue that the future belongs to the short, small and cheap; that big time production just is not where the world is right now. Most damning of all: In a show meant to honor film and television, they almost never showed clips of the films or television shows themselves. I mean, why waste time showing boring old movies and TV shows? The fight — and it is a fight for our lives — is to show why the things Hollywood does matter, why they are different and more meaningful than a 90-second microdrama or a 5-second meme. And there really is no bigger platform to carry that message than these damn awards shows. Enter: The Penske Media Golden Globes.
What a Night (Derogatory) Last week, I went into the corruption and illegitimacy of this whole event and body, so I won’t go down that rabbit hole again. Read it here if you haven’t:
Today, I’ll just look at how well they pulled off the production itself. Did this show elevate and spread enthusiasm for the medium it supposedly honors? Or did it make the entire industry look tawdry, tossed off and debauched in every move? I’ll go with the “every move” one. The goal of this production, from start to finish, was to make entertainment look like one big hustle. Like it’s all one big influencer’s con job, so who’s to begrudge anyone from trying to pull any nickel they can from every nook and cranny of the circus? The number of ways Penske Media found to cheapen and degrade this whole sector is extraordinary, and the ceremony itself felt no different: jacking up the price for tables, squeezing more seats in, the Polymarket betting pool tie-in (Don Jr. sits on the advisory board and is an investor) and the podcast award — to say nothing of their own in-house red carpet anchor cackling over the whole broadcast like some jackal guffawing at the execution.
It was like someone did an experiment. Every time the Oscar makes an attempt to tweak a hair on its head — shifting crafts awards to the pre-show, adding a “cheer moment,” whatever that was — the town yells bloody murder, invoking the spectacle of the entire thing being turned into a farce like the MTV Movie Awards. Last night, it was like someone took all the warnings of what lies down that path and said, “Yes, that sounds great — but can we have even more of it?” Hollywood, as it always does, went along with its own exploitation and humiliation, because what else is it going to do? Stand up for anything? The audience sat there and took it, because on the eve of Oscar voting, absence isn’t a statement — it’s a career risk.
It was a ceremony perfect for this moment in history. This was a Trump-era production, if there ever was one — this even before the producers played off Kleber Mendonça Filho, who was accepting the best non-English language film award for The Secret Agent, a movie about a “former professor attempting to… resist an authoritarian deceitful regime,” to get to a ham-fisted bit with a couple of UFC fighters before their event at the White House. (Filho was the only major winner cut off by the music while giving an acceptance speech, curious.)
And then, of course, there were the Penske-owned house organs presenting the “news” in Pravda-style fashion all night.
I’m not particularly complaining about the awards results themselves. The Golden Globes voters, wherever and whoever they may be in the witness protection program under which they are kept, stayed safely within the consensus lanes of the pundit class: One Battle After Another (four awards, including best comedy/musical, such a laugh riot that it is) and Hamnet (two awards, including best drama) are great films, deserving any praise they get. The major acting nominees were among the Serious Performances of the Year, and have been widely predicted and celebrated everywhere. And of course, the very elite ranks of people invited to the show did not include the actual voters. Or more than a handful of them — if that. I mean, you can quibble about how some award should have gone to this nominee instead of that one — I’m sure Katey Rich and Christopher Rosen will argue about this on the next episode of Prestige Junkie — but it’s not like the voters gave best actor to Sonic the Hedgehog. (I know he — it? — isn’t eligible this year, but being a Paramount property, I wouldn’t have put it past them.) So no slight to the voters and winners. It’s hard enough to get attention for great work right now, so I don’t begrudge anyone who finds some wherever it may be. Nikki Glaser was also… fine; better than replacement-level, with a mock-edgy opening that poked fun at most of the celebs in the room, with jokes that in the end, would have been perfectly at home in Jimmy Fallon’s monologue on any given night. (Her harshest barb was directed at Bari Weiss and, by proxy, David Ellison: “The award for most editing goes to CBS News, America’s newest place to ‘see BS’ news.”) No, it was the production from top to bottom that milked opportunities for clickbait and cash grabs into the show like a BuzzFeed headline writer circa 12 years ago. The tie-ins, the absurd gambits were packed in every free moment of airtime, like the extra tables crammed into the room, presumably to give the company a few more seats to sell. The Polymarket tie-in — with accompanying ad buy — really summed up how much this whole thing is just about cash, betting and LOLZ and nothing bigger than that.
Apparently, the Polymarket boards were visible in the room, making it clear that all this is just a cheap game playing dress-up in tuxes and gowns. That had the extremely classy side effect that, if you were not a likely contender to win, not only did you get to sit through three and a half hours waiting for your defeat, but you also got to see the enormous likelihood of that defeat broadcast to the whole room all night long. The cravenness affected the creatives, too. Instead of presenting the best score during the broadcast, as the Golden Globes have done for years, the award — won by Sinners — was given out during a commercial break and barely mentioned, if at all. Gotta make room for that podcast category! And a category to salute “cinematic and box office achievement”? Why bother voting on that and not just hand it to the highest-grossing film of the year? For that matter, why not have a category for the biggest paycheck of the year, saluting the star who got the most out of a studio? (Sinners also won this “honor,” all but marginalizing it from the “main” categories and making last year’s best movie feel like an also-ran.) What does this have to do with film or television? Is this just a night to salute “Stuff That Is Cool?” So why are they wasting time on films and shows at all? Why not just follow the TikTok awards and add an “Okay Slay” category? (I apologize in advance for even putting this into the air, since if they can sell against it, I’m sure it’ll happen soon enough.) The message, piled high to the rafters, was that the whole thing was one big con. The thing about the Globes is that pre-Covid, pre-boycott, pre-Penske, it was the kind of self-aware show that could have some fun with the whole thing. It was the antidote to the stuffiness and pomposity of the Oscars, with a community that went along with it but didn’t take the whole thing as seriously as cancer, like the rest of the awards-circuit slog. But then the producers, and certainly the attendees, if not the HFPA itself, were in on the joke, and sharing it with the crowd, winking to the audience as they drunkenly accepted their trophies. If the whole thing was a bit of a farce, it was done in good spirits, and somewhere at the bottom of it, genuinely saluting the medium. Today, the wink is between the producers and the owners over what they pulled off on the audience, not with them. Honestly, after Polymarket, after the podcast award, after the International Icon of the Year award, after the attempt to sell dinner with the voters via its publication Variety, is there anything that would be beneath this show? Try and think of something.
What really stood out, though, is how much in its attempt to be slick and not disrupt the gravy train, last night’s Golden Globes seemed like a show teleported in from another dimension — a world where all the upheaval, unsettling this country, and all the turmoil that has brought this industry to its knees in this last year, just didn’t exist. How did Nikki Glaser attack all the elephants in the Hollywood room right now? By largely just ignoring them. (She opened with a single “joke” about auctioning off Warner Bros. in the room, whoopee.)  Which isn’t to say that the entire show needs to wallow in grief over ICE raids and killings and the abduction of children from their parents (or vice versa), the anniversary of the fires, consolidation and runaway production, but if there’s going to be any meaning to it, the night has to exist in a world where those things exist. But in doing that, they went in league with the nihilism that is ripping us apart, and is a dagger presently sinking into the heart of this industry. From the Google Map-like drop pins that alerted viewers to where nominees were sitting in the ballroom, to the countless crass mentions of betting odds, to the announcers doing poor color commentary as the winners walked to the stage, they find every possible way to say none of this matters.
Which, for an industry desperately flailing to regain its cultural foothold, is the biggest kick in the teeth we could have. Brought to you — it turns out — by the company responsible for covering this industry, the company that is supposed to be the one to explain why any of this matters. Unless it’s all just deals, and get what you can where you can. What a lot of laughs.
Finally, Remembering What All This is AboutTo close: A lighter moment of jubilation, I captured at the Universal after party between Hamnet’s Chloe Zhao and Jessie Buckley. As silly, wrong, corrupt, etc., etc., etc., as this event may have been, let us never forget that at the heart of it all we have artists who have poured their souls into what they have made, just hoping that people will see and enjoy their work. And even when that recognition comes from dubious corners, any recognition for serious artistic achievement these days is something to celebrate. 
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