Much like Portaloo cleaners and gastroenterologists, award ceremony host is a thankless job that involves handling a lot of crap. The Academy Awards got so used to its hosts tanking (see: a gurning James Franco; Seth MacFarlane singing about boobs) that they briefly stopped hiring them all together before returning to the safe, staid embrace of Jimmy Kimmel (four years in a row now and counting).
Most hosts are either overtly trying to be offensive (see: Ricky Gervais, Macfarlane) that it becomes boring, or so inoffensive that they’re boring (see: Kimmel). On the years someone does an outstanding job (see: Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, Billy Crystal), they mainly serve as a reminder of how terrible everyone else did.
So step in Filipino American comedian Jo Koy, who was announced as the Golden Globes’ last-minute pick just two weeks before the ceremony. Koy was special, in that he seemed to quickly provoke outright hostility the Beverly Hilton has not seen since Richard Nixon threw his famous tantrum.
“I got the gig 10 days ago!” Koy yelled at the crowd after a joke about Barbie’s boobs went down like a particularly heavy lead balloon. “You want a perfect monologue? Yo, shut up. You’re kidding me, right? Slow down. I wrote some of these, and they’re the ones you’re laughing at.”
Like a man who thinks it is wise to hang his writers out to dry in a room filled with writers who recently went on strike for better recognition, Koy then cracked a joke about Taylor Swift – “The big difference between the Golden Globes and the NFL? At the Golden Globes, we have fewer camera shots of Taylor Swift” – that was so middling that it was immediately overshadowed by Swift’s icy reaction, staring unblinkingly at him while taking a sip of champagne.
It didn’t get much better when he made a lazy crack about Oppenheimer being long, or quipped about Barry Keoghan’s penis (“the real star of the show”) or the aforementioned joke about Barbie’s “big boobs” that appeared to annoy Ryan Gosling, make Harrison Ford stare blankly into space and Selena Gomez bury her face in her hands.
One reporter in the room shared that the mood was mutinous: “Wowee. Never seen an audience rebel against an emcee so quickly,” the New York Times’ Nicole Sperling wrote on X. “One prominent director just couldn’t keep his opinion quiet. ‘They all showed up. They are all here and this is what they give us? This is a disaster.’” “If you’re wondering if that played as bad in the room as it (probably) did on TV, the answer is yes,” Vanity Fair’s David Canfield wrote. “I mostly saw eyes darting around tables in confusion, wondering if they were supposed to be laughing.”
The best moments this year were, on the whole, entirely unscripted. Kieran Culkin burping into the mic. Lily Gladstone’s heartfelt acceptance speech. Yorgos Lanthimos excitedly informing Bruce Springsteen that they have the same birthday. Jon Batiste singing the Sonic the Hedgehog soundtrack. Cillian Murphy half-heartedly rubbing lipstick off his face, before accepting his award with a very red nose. It is perhaps telling that Paul Giamatti could encourage more genuine laughs with his brand of natural, avuncular chaos than Koy, a professional comedian paid to make people do just that – but it’s a crap job and apparently someone has to do it.
