The Oscars’ scandal-hit drunken cousin is soldiering on with a nominations list full of nonsense and gravitas. Shame they can’t find a host. Photo / Warner Bros.
The Oscars’ scandal-hit drunken cousin is soldiering on with a nominations list full of nonsense and gravitas. Shame they can’t find a host. Photo / Warner Bros.
Towards the end of his life, the great Zen master Hakuin enjoined his disciples to call to mind the sound of one hand clapping in order to summon up the sort of profound existential doubt beyond which perfect enlightenment lies.
The Golden Globes haven’t reached this point quite yet – but since the Hollywood awards body was hit by a barrage of scandals in 2021 involving allegations of racism, corruption and sexual assault, it’s fair to say that actual two-handed applause has been relatively thin on the ground.
Just one month away from January’s ceremony, with the nominations announced yesterday, the organisers have yet to find themselves a host. That’s partly because of the event’s tarnished reputation and partly because of the non-negligible chance of a sketch or one-liner blowing up in its deliverer’s face. (Chris Rock and Beef star Ali Wong are among the ideal candidates said to have turned down the job.)
Backstage more upheaval is on the way in the form of a change of television networks, from NBC to CBS, after the 2023 edition drew a near-record low of 6.3 million viewers.
Even so, they’re soldiering on. Why? Because despite the best efforts of the American-Canadian Critics’ Choice Association and the Palm Springs Film Festival, no other event has convincingly established itself as the first big night of Oscar season – the annual industry jamboree that leads to the stage of the Dolby Theatre, Los Angeles, in early March.
And the Globes, for all their manifest faults, still do a decent job of balancing nonsense with gravitas when drawing up their list of nominees.
I mean, you wouldn’t catch the Academy or Bafta putting The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s plangent and unflinching Holocaust drama which left Cannes reeling back in May, on an exact level (three nominations each) with Super Mario Bros.
The Globes can do this thanks to two quirks in their nomination system: one longstanding, the other brand new.
The former is their traditional doubling-up on the top three categories, with separate lists covering drama and comedy or musical releases – so that in the Best Motion Picture and two Best Performance fields, a reasonably broad range of work is up for consideration.
The latter is the newly minted “Cinematic and Box Office Achievement” award – essentially Best Motion Picture That Made Money. It is open to anything that took more than US$150 million ($245m) of which $100m ($163m) must have come from US audiences (sorry China) or enjoyed “commensurate streaming viewership” as ratified by “recognised industry sources”.
That second category – a smarter reworking of the Academy’s Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film prize, which was announced and then hastily abandoned in 2018, allowed the latest Mission: Impossible,John Wick 4 and Guardians of the Galaxy titles to join the list of contenders.
Karen Gillan, Chris Pratt and Dave Bautista in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Photo / Supplied
It also heaved the Barbenheimer duo up to the top of this year’s table, with nine and eight nominations respectively for Greta Gerwig’s plastic pink fantasia and Christopher Nolan’s dawn-of-the-nuclear-age epic.
Poor Things and Killers of the Flower Moon, Yorgos Lanthimos’ gothic sex caper and Martin Scorsese’s brooding western noir, followed right below with seven apiece.
Barbie’sthree appearances in the Best Song category do look mildly insane, especially since Wonka was eligible and went unmentioned. But then, it is to choose a favourite between Ryan Gosling’s I’m Just Ken and Dua Lipa’s Dance The Night, and the Globes were never going to miss a chance to invite Billie Eilish.
Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Norma Jean, Lily Gladstone, and Sarah Spurger in Killers of the Flower Moon.
Another please-turn-up nomination came in the form of a Cinematic and Box Office Achievement nod for Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, produced by and starring Taylor Swift, while the acting mentions for Joaquin Phoenix (for his three-hour absurdist comedy Beau is Afraid, rather than Napoleon), Timothée Chalamet (for Wonka) and Jennifer Lawrence (for No Hard Feelings) … well, let’s just say those won’t hurt the red carpet either.
But elsewhere there was surprisingly ample recognition for wildly deserving lower-key titles: five nominations for the South Korean-American love-triangle drama Past Lives and four for the French whodunit Anatomy of a Fall, including Best Motion Picture – Drama nods for each.
Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo in a scene from Poor Things. Photo / AP
Even the low-key Finnish romance Fallen Leaves – a deeply lovely film, but by no means an obvious awards monster – managed to sneak out of the non-English language category, landing a (very deserved) second nomination for its lead actress Alma Pöysti in the musical/comedy race. If and when commentators bewail the Oscars’ or Baftas’ tunnel vision in the new year, let’s hope they remember what the Globes spotlit.
There is no overlap between the Globes’ voting membership of 300 or so international show-business journalists and the Academy’s 9500-strong electorate made up of film industry employees.
But the tastes of the first group have been known to either foreshadow or rub off on the second, so one might tentatively conclude that Barbie, Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon and Poor Things are the season’s front-runners elect.
Overall it’s a respectable list, and the Globes deserve a hearty round of applause for coming up with it. But perhaps they should find that host first.
