Critic’s Notebook: A Flailing, Fun-Free 2024 Golden Globes Telecast
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Look, nobody can say that the Golden Globes didn’t have a hell of a run.
For 70-plus years, they chugged along as a genially tolerated and occasionally embarrassing industry institution, an opportunity to enjoy an open bar and play dress-up.
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But at a certain point — or, rather, a certain Los Angeles Times article, saying what everybody suspected but nobody wanted to say out loud — the embarrassment surpassed the tolerance and, for one year, the Hollywood Foreign Press was too chastened to give its awards publicly. That was followed by a show of televised self-flagellation that nobody actually thought was good, but at least it was flagellation, and the sense was that after years of questionable ethics and questionable voter representation, they owed the public that.
Despite seeming even more densely star-studded than usual, Sunday night’s 81st Golden Globe Awards telecast was the dullest awards show I’ve ever watched — and I’m including every solemn and uncomfortable awards show aired during the COVID pandemic, when people were producing shows via Zoom and having hosts film in their own garages, the sense of joy replaced by pervasive melancholy. This show didn’t have joy or melancholy or much of anything. It was a bad telecast, and the only reason I’m not calling it “a bad telecast from start to finish” is that there were good speeches here and there, as well as some decent winners, suggesting that the voting overhaul may, indeed, have resulted in a mysterious membership possessing less-than-egregious taste.
Jo Koy is a reasonably funny comic. When he delves into the specificity of his Filipino upbringing, he makes jokes nobody else can make, and he makes them with extremely high energy that plays remarkably well in huge venues. The guy knows how to work a crowd and navigate a big stage.
You would not know this if the Golden Globes opening monologue was your first exposure to Jo Koy.
The Globes have made a practice of trotting out hosts prepared to mock the HFPA and the Globes and Hollywood. See Ricky Gervais. See Tina and Amy. See Jerrod Carmichael’s soul-searching “Why am I even here?” monologue from last year.
Koy, in contrast, did a monologue that could have preceded any awards show except that most other awards shows would have come up with a host many weeks or months ago — I’m aware there were two major strikes — and had time to craft a show around that host’s strengths or limitations. This was not a Jo Koy monologue, a fact that he made clear multiple times, emphasizing that the parts that were bombing in the room were things that other writers wrote and the things people were laughing at were his contributions. Leaving aside that there were very few things in the monologue that anybody in the room was laughing at — Barry Keoghan deserves some sort of award for how hard he guffawed at a riff about his penis — once a host reaches the “placing blame” level of excuse-making within five minutes, there’s really nowhere to go.
Now, to be completely clear, Koy wasn’t wrong that he was delivering a poorly written monologue. It had no perspective on any of the year’s movies or TV shows and, in fact, gave the strong impression of having been written by people who hadn’t watched any of the movies or TV shows, even as Koy was joking about having watched all of the movies and TV shows. Whining about how long Oppenheimer is, while raving about Killers of the Flower Moon? Something about how the family in Saltburn was satanic? Comparing Bradley Cooper’s Maestro nose to Keoghan’s aforementioned penis? That’s all just weak joke-construction, and I don’t care whether those jokes came from Koy or the writers he glibly ran over.
There were no jokes about the Golden Globes, their new home, their new voting membership, nothing. Was the decision made that we’re all out of jokes about the Golden Globes? If you keep the Golden Globes name, you keep the Golden Globes baggage. At least for a few years. If you want to stop having to joke about the Golden Globes, make a new Drunk Hollywood Honors Film and TV Awards Show. Then everybody can just get drunk and honor film and TV.
Anyway, Koy did his monologue and nearly vanished. He made a limp Taylor Swift joke, which produced a “Taylor Swift Glowers at Limp Taylor Swift Joke” meme. Later, he mentioned Nicolas Cage’s birthday.
Hosts always vanish in an awards show telecast. Things start running long and hosts are the first thing to get trimmed, but this was on a whole different level. Koy appeared more frequently in commercial breaks teasing morning show interviews tomorrow than in the rest of the telecast.
The second thing that normally gets cut is presenter banter. And if only they had been more aggressively trimmed as well. Every presenting duo seemed confused about where they were supposed to stand, which camera they were supposed to be talking to and what the comic hooks of their “bits” were supposed to be. Eventually, there were a couple of semi-funny presentations — Andra Day and Jon Batiste celebrating their favorite video game score, Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig dancing to an intrusive musical sting. But there were far more complete duds — Method presenter Jared Leto, George Lopez and Gabriel Iglesias saying each nominee in their category had “it,” Jonathan Bailey asking Julia Garner for advice on how to handle the Golden Globes.
Somehow this was a show without any lifetime achievement awards or tributes of any kind that still managed to run long. Perhaps that’s because they needed to give out a made-up award for “cinematic and box office achievement,” which at least allowed Barbie to win something, but otherwise didn’t justify its existence. Also new to the show and failing to justify its existence was the “best performance in stand-up comedy on television”; the winner was Ricky Gervais, who wasn’t there and would have probably made everybody feel worse about the evening’s host if he had been.
OK! Now for the nice things.
There was a fun five-minute period in which Ayo Edebiri won and thanked her agent and manager’s assistants and was generally so charming that I’d suggest Ayo Edebiri should host next year’s Golden Globes (except that I want better for her than that). And then Kieran Culkin won and, after apologizing for burping through his initial nervousness, got very emotional reflecting on how he’d just made his peace with never winning at these shows. Emma Stone won and her celebrity friends — Taylor Swift! Jennifer Lawrence! — were so happy for her that it made her “Aw shucks” earnestness all the more charming. Speaking of earnestness, Steven Yeun, on the verge of tears throughout, and Lily Gladstone, much more composed and very conscious of the historical significance of her win, gave great speeches.
Nobody got played off, but everybody seemed afraid of getting played off. Or maybe everybody was just flustered because the set-up for the Beverly Hilton ballroom was so labyrinthine that it felt like half of the winners were walking over from a secondary ballroom in the Valley. Nobody was where they should have been, especially since most of the awards could have been predicted with ease. I’m as surprised as Justine Triet that Anatomy of a Fall was a double-winner, but surely somebody could have guessed big wins for Beef? I could have told you those guys shouldn’t have been placed in the self-parking garage.
Any time there was momentum in the show, a multi-minute walk to the stage or a fumbling hand-off of trophies sapped it. The poor production execution became more of a problem than the poor writing after a while.
Say something nice, Dan! Say something nice!
Umm … at least the Golden Globes are roughly aligned with the year in which we’re living? The Bear won comedy series for its second season, while the Emmys are apparently going to be next week and they still haven’t gotten around to recognizing the show’s first season. So, points to the Globes for timeliness. Good luck next week with last year’s awards, Emmys.
See you then, readers!
Golden Globes producer Dick Clark Productions is owned by Penske Media Eldridge, a joint venture between Penske Media Corporation and Eldridge that also owns The Hollywood Reporter.
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