Numlock Awards: What were the Golden Globes this year?
Hot sushi winter.
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 Michael.
A few weeks ago, Walter asked the question on everyone’s minds since the HFPA’s wild internal saga of the last few years: What are the Golden Globes going to be in this new landscape, with a (mostly) new membership and fresh off several scandal-laden years?
Well, this year we got our answer and it turns out: pretty much the same as always. Here are three takeaways from the Globes:
1. Winning a Golden Globe still means you make a speech in front of Meryl Streep, Steven Spielberg and Oprah. You can’t beat that.
Justine Triet (Anatomy of a Fall), Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon) and Da’Vine Joy Randolph (The Holdovers) are non-household names who got to stand in front of a pretty famous audience and promote their movies and themselves. Sure, the SAG Awards has actors praise acting in front of actors and the Critics’ Choice Awards… exist? But here we got a French writer-director plugging her 152-minute courtroom drama in front of industry heavyweights in a pretty unparalleled way. Ditto Lily Gladstone and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who got to make emotionally resonant speeches that should have a lasting impact on Academy voters as they pick up their ballots and vote in the coming days.
In other words, the Globes can still have the Huppert Effect, where some contenders vying for a spot in a crowded field get a visibility boost in the critical period right before voting. We’ll see if it pans out — Anatomy of a Fall having a strong Oscars nominations morning will be the most obvious indicator that this effect is still alive and well, as Gladstone and Randolph are more likely locks — but my hunch is the Globes’ accessibility is still pretty darn hard to beat.
2. Getting blanked still hurts.
Bradley Cooper wrote, directed, produced & stars in Maestro. Bradley Cooper lost Golden Globes for three of those things last night (he wasn’t nominated for the film’s screenplay). If someone wants an Oscar — and, let’s face it, this guy does — they can do this multi-hyphenate stuff and hope it works out in one of the categories. Spike Lee won an Oscar for writing BlacKkKlansman, while he was also nominated for producing and directing it; Warren Beatty won for directing Reds, with losses for producing, starring in, and writing the movie; twice, Clint Eastwood nabbed Best Picture and Best Director (for Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby) while losing Best Actor. It’s a great insurance policy on Oscar night!
But getting completely passed over in the major categories at the Globes is still no fun. Maestro is starting to look like the movie everyone appreciates as an awards contender, and yet no one actually likes enough for it to eke out a win in a major category come Oscars night. (For previous examples of this phenomena, see Avatar: The Way of Water, Mank, The Post, or Cooper’s own A Star Is Born, which only ended up winning for song.) So as not to come off as anti-Maestro, I’ll also point out that one of my personal favorites — May December — seems to have ridden its buzz to nowhere, coming up short on all four of its nominations as well, when Charles Melton seemed like an early front-runner for Supporting Actor not so long ago.
If Bradley & Co. want to rewrite the script on their awards season, it’ll evidently take more than reminding people how it took six years for Cooper to study six minutes of conducting, a feat Lydia Tár could accomplish in her sleep.
3. The Globes still like to do something weird for Best Musical or Comedy.
This year’s winner of Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy, was Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie got relegated to Cinematic and Box Office Achievement, a totally legit award whose criteria is making-a-lot-of-money-but-maybe-not-the-most-money-otherwise-why-reveal-a-winner-if-it’s-just-based-on-box-office-totals-oh-god-but-what-is-a-box-office-achievement-if-not-making-the-most-money-someone-save-me-from-the-simulation.
Last year, eventual Oscar Dominator Everything Everywhere All at Once lost to The Banshees of Inisherin, and a couple of years earlier the Borat sequel won. Sometimes they go high-brow (La La Land), sometimes they go low-brow (The Hangover), sometimes they just do something weird for fun (Toy Story 2). They avoid consistency at all costs. We’ll see how Poor Things fares — my hunch is it will have a more successful Oscar run than The Hangover — but either which way, this category always ends up being a fun delight to see which Golden Globes we’re getting that year.
That’s it for me this week! Excited to be on the ride with you all again this year.
P.S., the Academy has announced its shortlists in categories like Best International Feature and Best Original Song. We’ll do deep dives in the weeks to come when nominations are announced, but in case anyone wants a sneak peek as to the potential contenders, here you go.