MoviesMoviesThe Golden Globes are not necessarily a crystal ball, but wins for ‘Emilia Pérez’ and ‘The Brutalist’ suggest certain Oscars front-runners are not quite in the driver’s seat
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By A.A. DowdJan. 6, 5:26 pm UTC • 7 min
Eat your heart out, Elisabeth Sparkle. On Sunday night, Demi Moore took the stage of the Beverly Hilton Hotel to bask in the kind of late-career recognition that eludes her character in The Substance. Gallons of grateful tears are shed every awards season, but Moore seemed genuinely moved—and surprised!—to be up there accepting the Golden Globe for Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Motion Picture—Musical or Comedy. (Never mind that the movie, a nightmare body-horror satire of Hollywood’s impossible beauty standards, is neither a musical nor a comedy in the traditional sense.) Recounting how a producer once told her that she was a “popcorn actress,” not a serious thespian, the sexagenarian star spoke with a candor similar to the candor in the performance that brought her to the podium, her ferociously vanity-free turn as an aging sex symbol in free fall.
Unguarded displays of emotion have, in the past, distinguished this less prestigious award show from the more esteemed ceremony it anticipates, the Oscars. Thank the flowing spirits for that: “Hollywood’s biggest party,” so dubbed for its historic tendency to ply guests with liquid courage and truth serum, has the reputation of a looser, boozier, more amusing version of the Academy Awards. Things didn’t get too messy at Sunday night’s Golden Globes, the third since the event was wrested from the control of its original voting body, the controversy-plagued Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Under new management, the Globes ran as smoothly as such things can go. Nikki Glaser, the first woman to host the ceremony solo, handled roast-the-room duties more successfully than Jo Koy did last year, though her (intentionally) abandoned musical mash-up of Conclave and Wicked deserved much worse than the polite titters it provoked. And thank god for Seth Rogen, the only celebrity willing to acknowledge the unflattering camera angle from which the presenters were forced to deliver, in most cases, their dreadful, labored teleprompter banter.
It’s the Golden Globes’ position on the calendar, right before voting opens for the Academy Awards, that’s always afforded the ceremony a veneer of unearned importance—and much more power than a small group of celebrity-obsessed journalists ought to wield. No one confuses that group for kingmakers in the TV awards sphere. Though the guild strikes swapped the order of ceremonies last year, this year’s Globes assumed their regular, rightful position as a post-Emmys event, reflected in a slate of winners—dispersed to the likes of Shōgun, Hacks, The Bear, Baby Reindeer, and True Detective: Night Country—nearly identical to those handed out in September. Only The Penguin, which premiered a few days after the Emmys, benefitted from the Globes’ slightly different eligibility window. (Those of us watching from home, meanwhile, benefitted from a characteristically charming, humble speech by Colin Farrell, a one-time Hollywood bad boy who even made time to thank craft services.)
If the Globes merely reinforce the conventional wisdom of the TV awards cycle, they do exert some influence over what does or does not end up competing at the Oscars a couple months later. The Globes’ voting bloc may not overlap at all with the Academy’s membership (nor the guilds that bestow their own honors between these two events), but there’s no denying that a big win at the Golden Globes can bolster an actor or a film’s chances, increasing their visibility right before Oscar ballots hit inboxes. Sunday night’s ceremony certainly shook up the race, or at least clarified who has the momentum right now.
To the continued befuddlement of many who have seen it, Emilia Pérez cemented its status as a major award-season threat, taking home Best Motion Picture—Musical or Comedy, along with three other awards, including a Supporting Performance win for Zoe Saldaña’s clearly lead performance. Should this misguided Netflix prizewinner sing and dance its way to a Best Picture victory at the Academy Awards, it’ll arguably be the worst winner since Crash. But the Academy’s top prize could also go to The Brutalist, which took home the corresponding award for Best Motion Picture—Drama at the Globes, as well as statuettes for director Brady Corbet and the film’s star, Adrien Brody, who got a bit verklempt during his acceptance speech, too. Has the stage now been set for an Oscar-night showdown between a musical about a transgender cartel leader and a three-and-a-half-hour postwar saga of a Hungarian architect who survives the Holocaust, only to be swallowed whole by America?
Not so fast. A victory in either the Drama or the Musical or Comedy category does not always presage an Oscar win. Remember, the Globes didn’t go for Everything Everywhere All at Once, CODA, or Parasite (which wasn’t even nominated by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, ironically). Nonetheless, Sunday night helps both of these festival favorites—and probably hurts Anora. Sean Baker’s subversive, tragicomic Cinderella story went home empty-handed, which challenges its general, weeks-long perception as a front-runner for the Oscar. Whether this is just a minor setback in its own Cinderella story remains to be seen, but it wouldn’t be the first critical darling to go from expected bride to bridesmaid during the long lurch of awards season. (Though the Globes often mark the moment before that shift happens, given their previous support of such prematurely ballyhooed “sure things” as The Social Network and Boyhood.)
Sunday night also put a dent in the narrative that Wicked is the late-breaking film to beat this year. Jon M. Chu’s smash Broadway adaptation won only a single award—the recently introduced and probably unnecessary Cinematic and Box Office Achievement—and that’s basically a participation trophy designed to boost the ceremony’s ratings. It was almost touching to see Chu use his acceptance speech to position this holiday hit as an important work of art. Should it manage to mount a comeback and take home the Oscar, that will be a victory for crowd-pleasing catharsis, not serious cinema. Moore may not be strictly a “popcorn actress,” but Wicked is definitely a popcorn movie through and through.
The biggest upset of the night arrived with Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Motion Picture—Drama, an award that went to Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres, whose turn in I’m Still Here hasn’t exactly been tipped as a sure thing for Oscar attention. Her win over Hollywood luminaries like Nicole Kidman, Kate Winslet, and Angelina Jolie pushed back against the usual perception of the Golden Globes as a glorified act of gladhanding. It also underscored the difference expanding and diversifying an awards voting body can make. Would the journalists who once made room for Johnny Depp’s The Tourist ever have thrown their weight behind Torres?
Demi Moore, like Torres, went into the Globes as an Oscars dark horse and seems to have left them a real contender. Beyond these two Best Actress hopefuls, the awards may have increased the chances of Sebastian Stan scoring a richly deserved nomination in a few days.
The actor’s dryly comic work in A Different Man—which hit theaters the same day as The Substance, and similarly swaddled its lead in prosthetics—earned him the Globe for Male Actor in a Motion Picture—Musical or Comedy. If Stan fails to make the Oscars cut, chalk it up to vote splitting, industry cowardice, or a combo of both. After all, his other major performance this year was in The Apprentice, which cast him as a young Donald Trump. That Variety was unable to find another actor willing to pair with him for its annual awards-contender symposium speaks to a capitulating panic gripping Hollywood on the cusp of another Trump presidency.
Did that panic cost Jeremy Strong a Golden Globe? Probably not. His sharp work as Roy Cohn opposite Stan in The Apprentice was probably destined to lose, under any circumstances, to a performance that’s been gaining momentum since Sundance a year ago. If the Globes upheld any of this year’s major awards-season narratives, it was that Kieran Culkin’s turn as a struggling, charismatic screw-up in A Real Pain will probably continue to sweep the Best Supporting Actor category, despite the fact that—like Saldaña—he’s arguably a co-lead of his film. In a night low on the kind of live interpersonal fireworks that can make the Globes worth sitting through, viewers had to cling to small hints of drama, like the cutaway to a poker-faced Strong after Culkin was announced as the winner. Once again, the Method actor lost to his Succession costar.
The Globes are not a reliable crystal ball. Most years, they serve as an imperfect barometer for where Hollywood’s annual parade of self-love is headed. But if Sunday night’s ceremony failed to deliver on the promise of alcohol-fueled volatility that, in the past, seemed like the best and maybe only reason to tune in, this is the rare year when it would be nice for the actual awards they gave out to prove prescient. Let’s continue to see more love for Sebastian Stan’s two career-best performances, for the craft and scope of Brady Corbet’s flawed epic, for the outside-Hollywood artistry of the lovely Animated Feature winner Flow. And let’s get Moore back in that room. Another emotional speech from her would be as satisfying as the very different kind of gushing she does on stage during the unforgettable final minutes of The Substance.
