Globes bounce back as stars give awards ‘second chance’
Rebounding from a calamitous public-relations crisis sparked by a 2021 Los Angeles Times investigation, the Golden Globe Awards returned to the airwaves for the first time in two years last Tuesday.
And after months of often blistering controversy surrounding the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the small, improbably powerful group of international journalists that hands out the awards, the industry collectively signaled it is ready to forgive, if not forget, and get back to the business of receiving awards.
A key stop on the road to the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes was pulled off the air by NBC last year after a February 2021 Times investigation raised concerns about the group’s ethics and financial practices and revealed that not one of its then-87 members was Black.
Under a cloud of scandal, last year’s Globes were handed out in an untelevised private ceremony and announced on Twitter to resounding silence. For months, it was unclear whether one of the industry’s most-watched awards would be able to mount a comeback at all, as Hollywood all but blacklisted the HFPA, choking off its lifeblood of star power over thorny questions of racial inequality.
But in the end, a spirit of acceptance — and the power of awards season promotion — won out.
Celebrities including Margot Robbie, Michelle Williams, Billy Porter and Steven Spielberg once again strode the red carpet in their finery at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Winners — including “Everything Everywhere All at Once” stars Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan, “The Banshees of Inisherin” leading man Colin Farrell and the actor who played Elvis Presley in “Elvis,” Austin Butler — smiled and hoisted their trophies in the air, many hoping the award will serve as a springboard to the Oscars.
Spielberg’s autobiographical coming-of-age film “The Fabelmans” won the best picture award in the drama category, while the darkly comic fable “Banshees” won the best picture award in the comedy or musical category. Champagne flowed freely. There were some uncomfortable jokes and a few F-bombs, but no one got slapped. In other words, it was in many ways like any other year at the Golden Globes.
“Everyone deserves a second chance,” actor Richard Jenkins, a TV supporting actor nominee for the Netflix series “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” told The Times on the red carpet. “That’s why I’m here.”
That’s not to say the night long billed as “Hollywood’s Party of the Year” was fully back to its festive self. Although the evening is famous, and sometimes notorious, for its loose, boozy vibe, the mood at the 80th edition of the Golden Globes was more fraught than in years past as the industry grappled on live TV with whether to fully embrace an award that has lost some of its shine.
The Times investigation set off a cascade of criticism unlike anything Hollywood had seen since the #OscarsSoWhite firestorm. Studios and talent publicists banded together in an industry-wide boycott, threatening the Globes’ very survival. Scarlett Johansson urged the industry to “step back” from the HFPA until it undertook reforms. Tom Cruise returned his three Globes trophies.
In recent months, as the HFPA worked to persuade the industry that it had made substantive reforms, the suspense was less over who would be nominated than who would actually show up to the awards, which NBC bumped from its traditional Sunday night time slot to Tuesday to make room for “Sunday Night Football.”