So awards season and the Golden Globes got off to their new start. The cleaned-up and respectablised Globes put scandals about kickbacks and a lack of diversity in its voting body behind it, consigning the rackety “Hollywood Foreign Press Association” to the dustbin, replacing that with the “Golden Globes Foundation” and moreover drawing a line under the strike era.
This year’s Globes turned out to be, once again, the more relaxed and cordial of the A-lister prizefests – the delayed Christmas office party of Hollywood awards nights, with nominees drinking wine and being seen to do so on camera, and submitting to the mildest and weakest of roasts from the host Jo Koy. Having accepted this thankless MC role, Koy had to consent to being outshone by Kristen Wiig and Will Ferrell in their incidental co-presenters role – and by the memory of the notoriously outspoken former host Ricky Gervais, who showed that he was still a player by winning best performance in standup comedy for Armageddon.
But it was also an unexpectedly highbrow evening, and certainly a great night for the -enheimer half of the Barbenheimer phenomenon – though the Barb half, not so much. There were five wins for Christopher Nolan’s mighty, ruminative epic about the father of America’s nuclear bomb, J Robert Oppenheimer, and how he was haunted by his guilt and responsibility for making humanity take its decisive 20th-century step towards self-annihilation. It got best movie (drama); best director for Nolan; best actor (drama) for Cillian Murphy for his gaunt performance as Oppenheimer, with his sightless stare of horror; best supporting actor for Robert Downey Jr as Oppenheimer’s government nemesis Lewis Strauss; and best score for Ludwig Göransson.
Oppenheimer’s big competitor in the serious American epic stakes, Martin Scorsese’s superb Killers of the Flower Moon, was therefore rightly or wrongly put in the shade – although Lily Gladstone made history as the first Indigenous winner, picking up the best actress (drama) award for her potent performance in this true-crime historical drama, as the Native American woman at the centre of a conspiracy to defraud and erase her people.
As for Greta Gerwig’s delirious and surreal toy-franchise comedy Barbie, starring Margot Robbie, it didn’t convert many of its nine nominations. It won two awards: best song and the oddly conceived new “cinematic and box office achievement prize”, designed to recognise those financial successes which might otherwise be snobbishly ignored, and to reward a mix of merit and cash in proportions not entirely spelt out. Barbie was beaten in the best movie (musical or comedy) and best actress (musical or comedy) categories by Yorgos Lanthimos’s brilliant absurdist nightmare Poor Things and its extraordinary lead performance from Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, a Victorian fallen woman brought back from the dead in a bizarre Frankensteinian experiment.
Alexander Payne’s lovely 70s-set comedy The Holdovers, closer to the middle of the road, was a more conventional winner. It got acting Globes for the estimable Paul Giamatti, who plays a grumpy boarding school teacher who has to babysit troubled kids over the Christmas break; and for Da’Vine Joy Randolph for her lovable and fiercely tragicomic presence as the school’s cook, whose son has died in the Vietnam war in which the privileged white kids have managed to avoid serving.
And what a great night for Justine Triet’s fascinating courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall – already the winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or – getting not just best non-English language film but best screenplay, beating out more fancied runners such as Poor Things, Oppenheimer and Celine Song’s relationship drama Past Lives. And this year’s Globes also marked another chapter in the greatness of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, whose late-flowering movie The Boy and the Heron won best animated film.
But overall, a resounding success for Oppenheimer. So often the Globes are no guide to what happens on Oscar night, but this is a straw in the wind, and the first rumble of an Oscar landslide.
