Shocking Hollywood News: The Golden Globes Are Finally Fun Again

Just three years ago, the Golden Globes was canceled—both in the “culture wars” meaning of that word and quite literally.

Decades of controversy, corruption, and race scandals left the soiree, often billed as Hollywood’s booziest night, disgraced. The organization and its accompanying telecast have been scraping its way back to legitimacy since and, because you can’t keep a town full of sentient egos away from a party thrown in its honor, the industry has returned the Globes back to its status as a major awards stop in kind.

And so, through the power of an organization willing to evolve and a town’s inescapable narcissism, the Golden Globes have pulled it off: Once again, it’s the most fun awards show of the season.

After two years of pointlessness and the embarrassment of last year’s telecast, miracle of miracles, Sunday night’s Golden Globes was good.

Let’s face it, 90 percent of America has not seen or maybe even heard of most of the nominees. A significant number of the films aren’t even in wide theatrical release yet, while the amount of streaming services you’d have to subscribe to in order to see all the featured TV series would bankrupt an average person. So, awards shows live and die by two things: a host, and winners who understand what it means to give a good speech.

The Globes got that in its ace emcee Nikki Glaser, comedy roaster extraordinaire who approached the gig with just the right mix of affection for the platform and understanding of the lunacy of the bombast she was presiding over. Combating its notoriety for handing out trophies to the most famous stars who were the nicest to them—or who gave them the best bribes—this year, the organization also rewarded an admirably diverse, deserving group of winners.

The sprawling, ambitious epic Shōgun, the impeccably written comedy Hacks, and the harrowing, zeitgeist-seizing Netflix hit Baby Reindeer dominated TV categories. The Brutalist and Emilia Pérez were big winners on the film side. A three-and-a-half-hour odyssey and a Spanish-language French musical with a transgender lead are not the stuff that would have been championed in Golden Globe Awards past.

Audiences were likely grateful for the night’s levity, as that is what the telecast had historically promised, yet lost in the admirable push for all award shows to intangibly “mean something” in recent years.

Glaser kicked things off by welcoming the audience to “Ozempic’s biggest night,” wisely steering clear of jokes that would likely trigger groans from a humorless Hollywood crowd while managing to still detonate some provocative punchlines that wouldn’t offend too much.

Impossibly, that included edgy one-liners about alleged assassin Luigi Mangione, the never-ending parade of Hollywood predators (even after #MeToo), and, the trickiest, a bit about Diddy and his “freak-offs” that somehow managed to land. And even when she did name-check and lightly roast stars, she singled out the likes of Timothée Chalamet, Nicole Kidman, and Stanley Tucci, the ones who have shown the rare showbiz ability to laugh at themselves.

By the time Glaser broke out into a musical mash-up honoring Wicked and Conclave, only to interrupt herself because of how terrible it was, she had clearly won over the room.

Presenter banter managed to swerve around the landmine for cringe-comedy, thanks to smart pairings like Mindy Kaling and Kate Hudson, Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, Awkwafina and Melissa McCarthy, and Seth Rogen and Catherine O’Hara. Besides their hilarious extended bit about the fake Canadian movies they starred in before becoming famous, the latter two got huge laughs for finally calling out what everyone—both at home and in the audience—had been thinking: the positioning of the camera with the ballroom behind it and the teleprompter inches from the presenters’ faces was awkward to the point of undignified.

Another new innovation this year: floating pins that showed the locations of nominees in the ballroom as their names were read that, as some pointed out on social media, closely resembled the interface and design of a popular gay sex app. Hey, points for trying something new, Globes.

Much of a successful awards telecast is luck, in that producers have to hope that the chosen winners will deliver great speeches that will captivate everyone at home—people who have no idea what the project they won for is, let alone what the acronym alphabet soup of agencies, production companies, and studios that actors love to thank mean.

Zoe Saldaña got things to an endearingly emotional, if histrionic start for her Best Supporting Actress win for Emilia Pérez. At the very least, it was big energy to start the night with. That was countered beautifully by Kieran Culkin’s inherent, bumbling charm as he accepted Best Supporting Actor for A Real Pain.

Colin Farrell was wonderfully humble and humorous while accepting Best Actor in a TV Limited Series, Anthology, or Movie for The Penguin—“Yeah, I guess it’s prosthetics from this point out”—and making a point to thank the food service workers. It’s quite a transformation from a one-time Hollywood “bad boy.”

Without a doubt, the highlight of the telecast was Demi Moore’s win for The Substance. There is no overlap between Golden Globe and Oscar voters, so these wins can be viewed by some as meaningless. I see them as an audition: If you give a good speech, voters for other organizations will want to see more of you. I can’t imagine anyone not wanting to see, well, more of Moore after her profound, personal speech about how The Substance has revived her career and changed how she thinks about success. (She’s also outrageously good in the film.)

The night had other great wins: Sebastian Stan for A Different Man is an inspired choice, as is the most surprising win of the night, Fernanda Torres for the Brazilian film I’m Still Here, over the likes of Nicole Kidman (Babygirl) and Angelina Jolie (Maria). It’s exciting when that happens!

There were curious things that happened, too, as you’d want from an award show. I screamed with glee just about every time they cut to nominee Jeremy Strong looking like Paddington Bear had dressed up as Jamiroquai for Halloween.

And Jon M. Chu’s speech for Wicked was delivered with a seriousness that was as if he had just received a Nobel Prize for changing the world through his musical movie—which tickled me, given that the trophy he was accepting was, basically, “Here Is the Movie That Made the Most Money.”

The Globes are the first in what is about to be a dizzying slog of award shows. Now that it’s rebranded itself as “good” and not “inconsequentially silly and corrupt,” its position in that trudge to the Oscars is unclear.

Every other ceremony reliably rubber-stamps the same winners, to the extent that the Oscar trophies might as well be engraved before the telecast even happens; we are but at the beginning of a long few months of watching celebrity presenters attempt to pronounce “Emilia Pérez” with a Spanish accent.

The Globes made their mark in the past with their nonsense choices. When, now a legit organization with taste, it is also rewarding the same contenders, does that make it pointless and unnecessary?

The zing of fun that Glaser and the producers managed to bring back to the telecast—“vibes” is truly the only way to describe it—does make a case in the Globes’ favor.

I noticed that a little bit of the usual gravity was lost without the lifetime achievement honors handed out during the ceremony. Those speeches have generated some of the most meaningful and buzziest moments in recent Globes history, but this year’s winners Viola Davis and Ted Danson were feted at a separate event. There’s no doubt that their speeches would have been TV gold, but maybe not every award show needs the same heft—especially if the telecast is going to be as breezy as Sunday’s Globes was.

Look at what we’re dealing with in the world. If we’re going to be celebrating celebrities on top of all that…yeah, breezy is good.