Numlock Awards: What even are the Golden Globes at this point?

A chicken dinner hosted by a supporting actor on Young Sheldon, perhaps?

Numlock Awards is your one-stop awards season newsletter. Every week, join Walt Hickey and Michael Domanico as they break down the math behind the Oscars and the best narratives going into film’s biggest night. Today’s edition comes from Walter.

Welcome back! Awards season is revving up, and just wanted to write up a quick pre-holidays blog tackling one of the biggest questions we’re going to have to entertain this year.

But first: My book, You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything was released back in October. It was incredibly fun to talk to and meet a bunch of you during the tour. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you’ll really like it, give it a look.

Now, on to the blog.

Should we actually care about the Golden Globes?

I have never really liked the Globes — here you can see an itemized list of all the rude things I have said about them in print — and lots of the reasons I didn’t care for them were the same things that led to the downfall of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the implosion of their award show, its sale to a billionaire media magnate, and attempted revival with an almost entirely refreshed membership.

Basically, it resisted explanation that we care about the opinions of 87 people who in some cases were barely even critics. This was an organization beset by grift and scandal, and was interesting to me as a stats guy only because they did, in some cases, manage to actually tip us off with early insights into the Academy Award races. Why that is remains somewhat of an enigma, but it comes down to three things:

1. It’s entirely possible that the tastes of the HFPA and the tastes of the Academy just align, sometimes.

2. More likely, much like an early-state primary in a presidential election, a contender’s ability to convince 87 movie-adjacent low information voters to back them was occasionally a pretty decent indication of the long-term strength of their campaign, specifically their campaign’s ability to convince 9,000 movie-adjacent-low information voters to back them at the Oscars.

3. Though it may have been respected by few, it was at one point watched by lots, and the media exposure to the kinds of folks who would eventually vote on Oscars, and the juice from a win, could conceivably push a contender up some ballots.

The past few years have tested #3. The Globes were off the air, and then back on it, but barely watched. They haven’t done particularly well in that era, which I consider to be evidence that their platform really was what made them useful for forecasters. But this isn’t a newsletter that makes a meal out of small sample sizes, so let’s hold on to that for now.

The real issue is, the Golden Globes have pulled a Ship of Theseus. They have retooled their membership, if not totally, then certainly mostly. Our model values the Golden Globes, not as much as the industry insider awards like SAG, the PGA, or BAFTA, but it has scored the Globes based on their track record and considered it a pretty integral input into the model. For the Supporting acting races, in fact, it’s one of only four major precursors that inform our judgment.

But I don’t actually think you can call this the same electorate. I think there’s a discontinuity.

Can we, in good conscience, use the track record of a precursor award’s predictive power if, over the past year, most of that voter base has turned over completely?

As much as I want the answer to be something different, I believe the answer kind of has to be yes.

How the Globes have changed

I’ll keep this as quick as possible. If you get bored, just skip to the bottom. I just want to spell out how stupid this is and how nuts it’s driven me.

The prologue for all of this is that the Golden Globes, not unlike the Academy itself, is an organization that doesn’t simply publish a list of its members. In 2015, Vulture did the best existing work figuring out who these people are and what their affiliation is. If you’re curious as to why I have long remained skeptical of this august assemblage, leaf through some of those CVs. There are 87 members.

The organization remains essentially locked in amber until early 2021, when a series of Los Angeles Times articles blows up their spot and reveals what one lawsuit called “a culture of corruption,” described it as a cartel, one that is rather direct to bribe, one that pays its voters to watch movies, and despite billing itself as a diverse representation of the town’s foreign press, in fact contained no Black members.

In May 2021, NBC announced it would not air the Globes in 2022. In June, two voters resigned amid an overhaul.

Pressure followed, panic ensured, and by October 2021 the organization announced 21 new members, many of whom were from underrepresented groups, all of whose names are revealed. This brought membership up from the 87 reported in 2015, minus two quitters, up to 105 members. No, that math does not work. No, I don’t know what happened. One guy probably died or quit. Just roll with me. October 2021, 105 members.

Those guys voted on an awards show nobody saw in January, 2022 that failed to predict most Oscars.

In September, 2022, the HFPA invites “103 new international voters,” but these are not evidently members, as they specifically say, “This signifies the first time in the Association’s history that a group of non-member voters has been added to select the nominees and awards.” So, 105 members, plus 103 non-member voters. However, now the number of voters is revealed to be precisely 200. No, that math does not work. No, I don’t know what happened. Eight guys probably died or quit, so now we’re at 97 members and 103 non-member voters, I guess. Just roll with me. September 2022, 200 voters.

They had an awards show in January, 2023 that failed to predict most Oscars and was watched by a third of their pre-crisis viewership.

Then, on April 10, 2023, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced it will be adding 215 members. This, they said, will bring the HFPA total membership to 310. Members! Who are the 215? We don’t know. I guess some of the 103 voters got a promotion to members, and then at least 112 new people got the nod. Given what I guess is 97 members in September ’22, and then 215 new members in April ’23, this obviously adds up to 312 members, except no it doesn’t, it’s actually 310. No, that math does not work. No, I don’t know what happened. Two guys probably died or quit. Nevertheless! Remember, because this part’s important: April 2023, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association now stands at 310.

Anyway, on June 12, 2023, The Hollywood Foreign Press Association disbands.

They sold the Golden Globes™ to Dick Clark Productions, the corporate sibling to Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. The show goes on.

On October 2, 2023, the Golden Globes said that it now has 300 journalists as voting members. What happened to the ten? Who cares? There have been Soviet purges with more assiduous record keeping and commitments to transparency. This is not a place of math. Just roll with it.

What is nice now, though, is they list their members now. They list 300 people. So where does that leave us?

The Ship of Theseus

The principle of how I forecast the Oscars based on precursor awards is that I can look at the historical accuracy of an award in predicting the Oscar. But awards are not inanimate; they are physical manifestations of the will of voters. So what I’m really measuring every year is how good that body of voters is in predicting the Oscars with their preferences.

I just don’t think it’s the same body at this point.

I compared that current roster 300 to the roster of 87 voters that Vulture tabulated in 2015. Only 37 of them are still listed as voters in 2023, out of 300 today.

Even counting the 21 voters added in 2021, only 57 of those total names remain, good for just 19 percent of the current Globes voter base believed to be in the organization in 2021.

Basically, I think they succeeded: I think this is a totally new organization. And so I think I should treat it as such. I don’t think it would be accurate to carry forward the historical predictiveness of the Golden Globes pre-2023 into 2023.

This is all to say: I think it’s time to relegate the Golden Globes. I think we treat them like we would any other local municipal critics organization. If they can out-forecast, say, the Los Angeles or New York or Phoenix or Texas or Toronto or wherever critics, factor them in. Otherwise, just noise we tune out. This leaves the Critics’ Choice as the only critics group automatically making it into the model. If in the course of a couple more years the Globes voters reveal themselves to have any kind of aptitude for forecasting, perhaps I’ll welcome them back into the model.

But if they don’t inherit the critics, they don’t inherit the historical predictiveness.

Hold on. Hold on. But what if it is the platform?

Alright so this is the part where I reveal why that decision makes me nervous. Remember, we care about the Globes for some mixture of three reasons:

1. The HFPA and Academy might have similar-ish tastes

2. The Globes reveal who is good at campaigning

3. They’re televised and their winners get to be on television

Relegating them out of the model is in line with the thesis that #1 is the more important factor.

But if #2 is the more important factor, well, they’re still an opportunity for campaigns to flex muscle, just one that requires bribing or “incentivizing to vote” from 300 people rather than merely 87. If that’s what we’ve been measuring, then maybe we needn’t drop them.

And if #3 is the more important factor, well, the Globes are back. We’ll want to see if these things get higher ratings than the least-watched NCIS episode, sure, but one nice thing about getting bought by the guy who owns all the trade publications is that yeah, you’re gonna get in the paper.

So I don’t know. Maybe I break them into a Standard and a Globe-free model, but I’ve seen enough elections in my time to know that splitting your model apart doesn’t always get the answers you desire. That said, I do like working in public on this, so I’m all ears. Let me know what you think here.