Golden Globes 2025: Nikki Glaser’s salty, irreverent performance made her the best host since Ricky Gervais

Comedian Nikki Glaser hosting the 2025 Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles. Photo / @goldenglobes

Thanks to its new host’s precision-tooled swipes at Hollywood elites (but not Blake Lively), the cringey gong show finally has its bite back, Ed Power writes in his four-star review of the award show.

The Golden Globes occupies a strange place in Hollywood in so far as people only notice it when something goes wrong. Nobody gave a hoot that it was dropped from the TV schedules and boycotted by the movie industry in 2022 amid complaints about its organiser, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. But there was great excitement last year as one-and-done host Jo Koy delivered a disastrous opening monologue, during which Taylor Swift was seen icily chugging her champagne glass. The louder it crashes and burns, the more we care.

After that Koy calamity, the organisers pressed the panic button by hiring as MC Nikki Glaser, a relatively obscure comedian and former contestant on America’s version of Strictly Come Dancing best known for her acid-tongued appearances on the celebrity “roasts” that are so beloved in the US.

But unlike the flailing Koy, she seemed to actually want the job. Having reportedly spent her entire Christmas road testing her jokes on live audiences, her monologue was a blast – a salty and irreverent onslaught that was a great fun even if it never reached the scorched-earth heights achieved by Ricky Gervais during his five stints at the podium.

You could tell Glaser had prepared because her zingers were precision-tooled to shock without ever threatening to bite the hand that feeds.

Ahead of the broadcast from the Beverly Hilton, she had confirmed that she would not be cracking wise about It Ends With Us star Blake Lively’s sexual harassment and retaliation lawsuit against the film’s director, Justin Baldoni – describing the controversy as “such a hot-button thing right now”.

Instead, she kept it cuddly, with a joke about Wicked (“I did not know about Wicked going into this year... because I had friends in high school”).

That was followed by an extended, if ultimately laboured routine, about Timothée Chalamet’s weird moustache and his unusual name – which she encouraged comedian Adam Sandler to growl aloud from his seat, on account of its supposed hilarity.

She also referenced rapper Diddy’s debauched “freak offs” and fired a few barbs at Hollywood hypocrisy and egotism. “You’re so famous, so talented, so powerful – you can do anything, except tell the country who to vote for,” she quipped – a nod to the industry’s voracious support of unsuccessful presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

Some of Glaser’s spiciness seeped into the bloodstream of the four-hour-plus broadcast. When a celebrity approached the stage, the screen flashed bizarre facts that read like the bottom of their Wikipedia entry. Did you know, for instance, that Demi Moore (a winner for The Substance) has a vintage doll collection?

Still, it wouldn’t be the Golden Globes without some toe-curling low-lights. This year, most of those involved Dwayne Johnson.

Announcing the Best Supporting Actress nominees alongside Moana 2 co-star Auliʻi Cravalho, he delivered a lame joke about Chalamet using Johnson’s chest hair to fill out his quiff when playing Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown.

Further in, Johnson grinned in agony as his Fast and Furious co-star Vin Diesel attempted to paper over their well-publicised on-set feud with a shout-out to the man who had publicly labelled him a “candy a--”.

The speeches are often the least memorable aspect of an award ceremony, so it proved once again. Zoë Saldaña had an f-bomb censored when accepting her award for Best Supporting Actress for Emilia Pérez. Later, Colin Farrell thanked the caterers who had looked after him on the set of The Penguin.

A few of the skits landed awkwardly, too. An extended gag about the obscurity of Canadian awards shows featuring Seth Rogen and Catherine O’Hara was mystifyingly obtuse while a rude line by Rogen about fellow Canadian Ryan Gosling was bleeped out by the broadcasters.

Glaser, by contrast, had the brass neck to carry off even the limpest material. At one point, she appeared wearing a papal mitre for a sketch in which she mashed together Wicked and cloak-and-dagger Vatican drama Conclave by singing “Pope-ular” (a riff on Wicked’s Popular).

It was wildly unfunny, but Glaser sold the bit – partly by having the good sense to abandon it halfway through. It confirmed her as the ceremony’s best host since Ricky Gervais, and while that truly is the faintest of praise, there is no disputing that her Golden Globes debut was wickedly enjoyable.