The Golden Globes: An awkward launch into awards season
This year’s Golden Globes ceremony “begged to be rated on a curve,” said James Poniewozik in The New York Times. But the glitch that marred the very first acceptance speech—an inadvertent muting of actor Daniel Kaluuya— encapsulated two challenges that this edition of the popular awards show couldn’t fully overcome: how to manage a three-hour live broadcast during a pandemic and how to address the embarrassing revelation that there is not one black member of the award-giving body, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Kaluuya, winner of a best supporting actor prize, did eventually get his say, but because other deserving black artists had been snubbed in the nomination process and because the Los Angeles Times also had exposed corruption in the HFPA voting ranks, the normally frivolous Globes “were serious news this year for all the wrong reasons.”
The night’s winners were generally uncontroversial, said Miles Surrey in TheRinger.com. Chadwick Boseman’s widow tearfully accepted her late husband’s well-deserved best actor trophy for
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Chloé Zhao’s win for Nomadland made her only the second female director ever to be awarded a Globe. And although The Crown’s four TV trophies did nothing to advance the cause of diversity, that Netflix series about the U.K.’s royal family “just so happens to be one of the best shows of the past year.” Still, the Times exposé hung over the entire broadcast, said Richard Lawson in VanityFair.com. Co-hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, bantering on opposite coasts, “did their best to make light of the situation.” But why the pair bothered to go on with the show is unclear. “Why would anyone, for that matter?”
Traditionally, “the Globes were allowed to be ugly behind the scenes because they were fun onstage,” said Daniel D’Addario in Variety. This edition, though, felt less like a night of tipsy camaraderie and more like an enervating Zoom conference. “It was an evening defined by sourness and a sense of obligation on all sides,” with the unquestioning assumption that conducting business as usual was the best way to fend off an existential threat. Unfortunately, it “likely convinced many viewers to change the channel.” Worse, they may not come back.