Golden Globes Try to Get Back to Normal — With an International Twist | Analysis

“Wicked” was not one of the big winners at Sunday’s Golden Globe Awards. It came into the show with four nominations and only won once, in the two-year-old category of Cinematic and Box Office Achievement — a category that seemed designed to celebrate popcorn movies that wouldn’t get Globes any other way.

But when he got to the microphone to accept its one award, “Wicked” director Jon M. Chu sounded a note that could have summed up many of the movies that won in the Beverly Hilton ballroom on Sunday: “We can still make art that is a radical act of optimism.”

You could say that about “Wicked,” and about “Emilia Perez,” “Conclave,” “The Substance,” “A Different Man,” “Flow” and many of the films that won Globes. And if Chu’s comment seems to be a heady thought to inject into one of the most frivolous and questionable of Hollywood’s awards shows, perhaps it took a radical act of optimism to think that the Golden Globes could be back to normal after five years that have seen the show boycotted, taken off the air, revamped and rejiggered and apparently kind of resuscitated.

This felt like a old-style Golden Globes show: loose, messy, moving at times, dull at others and mostly inconsequential in the grand scheme of the Oscar race – except that it might actually have given a boost to some contenders, notably Demi Moore, Fernanda Torres, “The Brutalist,” “Emilia Perez” and the animated feature “Flow.”

That’s the weird thing about the Globes, that it can be all those things and still be a show where one of the jokes was based around the mocking declaration by Seth Rogen that the Golden Globe was “the most important award in Hollywood.”

Everybody laughed, because it’s obviously not that. It’s a curious award that used to be given out by 80 or 90 Southern California-based journalists (some full-time, some part-time, some downright questionable), and is now voted on by 300-plus critics and journalists scattered around the world – a body of voters that is more respectable, less homogeneous, less predictable and in a way more unknowable. But were their choices any different than the old gang would have made?

In some ways, no. Conventional wisdom said that the old Golden Globes would have given an award to Demi Moore because she was a star whose comeback they’d want to be the first to celebrate – but the new Golden Globes did it, too, and Moore gave herself momentum going forward in awards season with an emotional speech talking about the producer who told her 30 years ago that she was “a popcorn actress … and I bought in, and I believed that.”

Other choices in the film categories were largely predictable, with supporting frontrunners Zoe Saldaña and Kieran Culkin winning for “Emilia Pérez” and “A Real Pain,” respectively, and the new voters doing what  their predecessors often did, which is to spread the wealth. The first nine Globes in the film categories went to eight different films, with “Emilia Pérez” being the only film to win more than one award until the last half hour of the ceremony, when “The Brutalist” added two additional wins, including the crucial Outstanding Motion Picture – Drama award, and “Emilia” secured its position as the night’s biggest winner by taking the final awards, Outstanding Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy.

Other times, though, it was easier to see the effect of a different group of voters. In the television categories, where they used to love to be the first to reward shows that would later go on to win Emmys, the voters embraced a full slate of Emmy winners from last September: Jean Smart for “Hacks,” Hiroyuki Sanada for “Shōgun,” Jessica Gunning for “Baby Reindeer,” Jeremy Allen White for “The Bear,” Jodie Foster for “True Detective: Night Country” and the series winners “Shōgun,” “Hacks” and “Baby Reindeer.”

And in one of the most surprising wins of the night (though TheWrap had predicted it), Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres beat Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, Pamela Anderson, Kate Winslet and Tilda Swinton – a victory for a remarkable performance that could also have gotten a boost from the fact that Brazil is the country with the most representatives among Globes voters, 25, according to voter bios on the organization’s website.

Torres’s win was one of many for films from international filmmakers, along with “Emilia Pérez,” “Conclave,” “The Substance,” “Flow” and “Challengers.” Even the biggest winner among American films, “The Brutalist,” is focused on a lead character who comes to the United States after leaving Europe during World War II.  And it’s worth noting that the thoroughly American film with the most heat coming into the ceremony, “Anora,” was shut out completely.

The old body of Globes voters had the word foreign in their title, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, but their successors are apparently doing more to put the foreign influence into the show itself. In her acceptance speech for one of the “Emilia Pérez” awards, songwriter Camille said of the Globes, “This is such an American experience.” In a way (all that American glitz), it was – but on Sunday, it was an American experience with a distinctly international feel.

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