It was a year of comebacks at the Golden Globes. Not just for Pamela Anderson, the Nineties icon nominated for her show-stopping appearance in Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, or Demi Moore, who won the first major award of her career for her turn in The Substance. No, the most significant return to form was pulled off by the Golden Globes itself. A couple of years ago, the awards show looked to be fighting for its life. Tonight, it put in a performance worthy of picking up, well, its very own prize.
Back in 2022, the Golden Globes ceremony was widely boycotted and pulled from television as then-parent organisation the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) became engulfed in a diversity and ethics scandal.
The fallout was so dramatic that the HFPA was disbanded in 2023 and replaced by a new organisation under the management of Jay Penske, whose Penske Media Corporation owns all the major Hollywood entertainment publications (Variety, Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline), and Todd Boehly, a businessman best known in the UK as the owner of Chelsea Football Club.
The Penske-Boehly era of the Golden Globes got off to a shaky start last year, enjoying a huge ratings boost but seeing last-minute host Jo Kay widely panned for his lacklustre and largely laugh-free monologue.
This year, the organisers got their first major decision spot on: hiring Nikki Glaser to take over. A star-making turn at Netflix’s Roast of Tom Brady last year proved Glaser has the chops to tear Hollywood to shreds. Tonight, she showed she’s wise enough not to get too savage and knows when to keep the gloves on.
Her finely calibrated monologue was more of a gentle tease than a roast, drawing laughs but winning over her star-studded audience. Glaser recently told Deadline that she hopes to host the Globes “year after year”, and if Penske and Boehly have any sense they’ll let her.
When it came to the awards themselves, there were a pleasing number of curveballs scattered in among the widely-predicted winners. As expected, FX’s historical epic Shōgun and Netflix’s stalker drama Baby Reindeer both repeated their performance at last year’s Emmys by sharing the majority of the television awards between them.
Less predictable was the victory of Zoe Saldaña, who triumphed over the widely fancied Ariana Grande of Wicked for her role in Emilia Pérez. It was just one of many awards taken home by the cast and crew of the surreal Spanish-language musical, including the final award of the night for Best Film Comedy or Musical.
Another surprise was the victory of Brazilian I’m Still Here star Fernanda Torres, who won Best Actress in a Drama against a category packed with huge names: Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, Tilda Swinton, Pamela Anderson and Kate Winslet. She became only the second Brazilian actress ever to win in the category: the first, Fernanda Montenegro, is her mother.
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Elsewhere, another of the night’s major triumphs belonged to director Brady Corbet, whose film The Brutalist picked up several key awards to leave it a firm favourite for the Oscars, which take place two months from now on Sunday 2 March. His sprawling three-and-a-half hour film comes complete with an intermission, but that didn’t put off voters who named it Best Drama as well as giving Corbet the prize for Best Director and star Adrien Brody the nod for Best Actor in a Drama.
In his second acceptance speech of the night, Corbet pointed out how often he’d been told that a very long film about a Holocaust survivor architect just didn’t seem like a safe commercial bet, and used the film’s success to advocate for the importance of letting directors have final say over their films.
While moments like that embued the night with a weightiness, the Globes balanced that with several welcome dashes of silliness and frenzied anarchy. At one point, Glazer donned a bishop’s mitre for a musical number that combined giddy musical Wicked with Vatican thriller Conclave: “You’re gonna be Pope-ular.”
The playfulness continued into the details. Whenever new presenters appeared on screen they’d be accompanied by on-screen “fun facts” that ranged from the mundane to the deranged. When Vin Diesel strode out, the caption deadpanned: “In addition to acting, Vin Diesel is passionate about Dungeons & Dragons.”
Glaser’s crack about Diddy drew a few gasps and groans, but only one moment seemed to actually cross the line: as Seth Rogen and Catherine O’Hara riffed about winning a fictitious Canadian film award for an “unauthorised Ryan Gosling biopic”, the sound was cut out as he reportedly added: “Yes, it was unauthorised, and the Mickey Mouse Club handjob scene was controversial, but we felt very important to depict.”
It may not truly be an awards show where anything goes, but sometimes it managed to feel like it. By the time transgender Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón delivered a moving speech to cap the night, it seemed scarcely believable that it so recently seemed like the Golden Globes could be on the verge of being cancelled forever. The show wrapped up, bang on schedule, and a diverse group of winners spilled out into the night clutching their awards. The Golden Globes are back, proving Hollywood loves nothing more than a well-timed reboot.