The Golden Globes Tried to Have It Both Ways
During Sunday night’s Golden Globes, the host Nikki Glaser expertly ribbed the nominees in her opening monologue. Beaming presenters read their lines off teleprompters. Some winners cried as they thanked their loved ones. The ceremony ran long.
This was business as usual, in other words. Though the Globes have developed a reputation for being a boozy affair, those inside the ballroom seemed determined to generate a polite atmosphere. Hollywood is undergoing plenty of turbulence—a month ago, Netflix struck a deal to purchase Warner Bros., and a month from now, the actors’ union SAG-AFTRA will enter into a fresh round of contract talks that could lead to another strike—but Glaser delivered only light jokes about the industry’s precarity. A few attendees wore tiny pins that read “Be Good” in honor of Renee Nicole Good, who was fatally shot by an ICE agent last week in Minneapolis. The winners who mentioned politics in their acceptance speeches opted for broader messages, describing how “we live in a very divided country” and urging “a shared humanity.” The night was a far cry from boisterous past ceremonies that also took place in times of turmoil, and farther still from the work that was being honored.
The evening’s final two film winners captured the apparent tension between defining Hollywood as a place for escapism and acknowledging real-world uncertainty. The Best Motion Picture—Musical or Comedy winner One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, is a propulsive thriller about a former revolutionary, who is thrust back into his previous lifestyle to save his daughter. The Best Motion Picture—Drama winner Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s take on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel imagining the hidden origins of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is a potent tearjerker about art’s transformative power. Both movies are made by auteur filmmakers; both offer cinematic visions of bestsellers. But while One Battle After Another touches, as my colleague David Sims put it, a “raw nerve” in its examination of the costs of American political violence, Hamnet is its opposite in scope and tone: a formal, intimate period piece about the Bard and his personal tragedy.
[Read: A sobering awards season pivot]
Anointing this pair of films came across like a deliberate choice. Taken together, they allowed voters to split the difference between making a point about the world Hollywood faces and recusing themselves from doing so. One Battle After Another was the most feted film of the night—it scored four trophies, including Best Director for Anderson—yet it was the somber Hamnet that closed the evening as the winner of the last category presented.
As a result, One Battle After Another’s triumphs at the Globes didn’t feel much like a coronation. Instead, last night’s remarkably muted ceremony at times seemed unsure of what it was meant to celebrate at all. The event is ostensibly meant to recognize the industry’s creative talent, yet it didn’t broadcast one of the craft categories, Best Original Score, which went to the Sinners composer Ludwig Goransson. The evening is also supposed to represent the tastes of the Globes voting body—which is composed of international members of the press—yet the only speech cut short by music was that of Kleber Mendonça Filho, the director of the Best Non-English Film winner, The Secret Agent. Even the freshly added Podcast category offered a confusing sample of what constituted quality: chitchat shows hosted by celebrities and a news program from NPR.
Late in the night, the comedian Wanda Sykes cut through the monotony and brought some sharpness to the stage. As she accepted the Best Performance in Stand-Up Comedy trophy for the absent Ricky Gervais, she thanked the trans community on his behalf, in a pointed jab at Gervais’s history of offensive joke-making. Fiery moments such as hers were few and far between, though. The ceremony was dominated by winners that had much more of substance to say onscreen than at the podium. Most of the awarded films apart from Hamnet, including The Secret Agent, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Marty Supreme, and Sinners, are defined by a sense of urgency; the same goes for the TV shows honored, such as The Studio, The Pitt, and Adolescence. But with a handful of exceptions—such as Teyana Taylor, who won for her performance in One Battle After Another, punctuating her speech with a rallying cry for her “brown sisters and little brown girls” to remember that “our softness is not a liability”—those in the ballroom seemed incapable of finding much of a spark.