Michael Phillips: 8 takeaways from the Golden Globes and a tough night for Jo Koy

I’m still reeling, quietly — it’s like quiet quitting, but with reeling — from Sunday’s exercise in cringe-watch hosting suspense and occasional legitimate delight, plus some excellent awards choices, also known as the 81st Golden Globes.

The telecast felt like a three-hour long COVID symptom, not quite with it. Forgetful. Blurry. Everybody kept thanking the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which no longer exists. Dick Clark Productions took over the Globes last year, after NBC let the show go after its lowest-ever ratings. The HFPA’s scandal-clouded history (from sexual harassment to disregard for diversifying its membership roster) led to a series of apologies in the wake of a 2021 Los Angeles Times investigation.

The Golden Globes very nearly rolled off into oblivion, and many believe it should have. And yet Hollywood’s backhanded affection for the show, the hardware and even the travails behind it all, rendered it too big to fail. So there it was, having moved to CBS last night, with strategically inoffensive comedian Jo Koy hosting. And, three minutes into his opening monologue, it was like every Irwin Allen disaster movie put together.

Eight takeaways

1. Jo Koy deserves a break: I mean, wrong guy for this, to begin with. Super-high-energy standups a lot funnier than Koy couldn’t develop a rhythm with a crowd this distracted, boozy and judge-y. Koy is like Kevin Hart but more so: Desperate to kill, and to ingratiate. But here? Six credited writers and .006 decent punchlines between them. Matching the Golden Globes’ own plea for forgiveness and redemption, five minutes into the show Koy was likewise pleading, through teeth beaming like Klieg lights, for forgiveness himself, in real time. It is no fun watching a comic flame out in 150 countries at once.

2. Koy-unrelated, don’t try to be cute with the announcer outros: An outro is the bookend to a voice-over intro; it’s the part when the unseen announcer, going into a commercial break, says “Coming up next …” Purely expedient stuff, and trying to clever it up Sunday proved puzzling in the extreme. “Looks like Martin Scorsese can’t sit still!” we heard, as the camera showed the “Killers of the Flower Moon” director sitting still. (They wrote that hoping he’d be antsy when outro time came?) More straightforwardly, later, we were asked: “Love seeing celebrities fan-ing out over other celebrities?” Uh, no?

3. “Oppenheimer,” meet Oscar: The billion-dollar success “Oppenheimer” dominated the Globes last night with five wins, including best film (drama category), best director (Christopher Nolan), best actor (Cillian Murphy, with lipstick on his nose), best supporting actor (Robert Downey Jr., who thanked the “Golden Globes journalists” for “changing your game”) and best musical score (Ludwig Göransson, reminding us that to many, “best” really means “most”). “Oppenheimer” feels like the likely best picture Academy Award winner come March 10.

4. “The Bear”! A major winner in the TV categories, along with “Succession,” “The Bear” took top honors for best comedy (though it’s 51% drama at least), “Succession” for drama (though it’s 51% dark comedy). “The Bear,” heading into production on its third season now that the strikes are over, is that rare entity: a hit TV show that devotees and haters alike describe as “nerve-wracking.”

5. “Poor Things” zooms “Barbie”: Here’s a heartening case of two very different comedies reminding us that 2023 was, in fact, a very, very good year. I would’ve been pleased with either film winning here: the luscious-looking Yorgos Lanthimos odyssey of discovery starring Globes winner Emma Stone, or the Greta Gerwig odyssey of Mattel-wrangling for fun and profit. “Barbie” did win in a newly created Globes category Sunday, for “cinematic and box office achievement.” Once upon a time in Hollywood, the first-ever Academy Awards ceremony in 1929 carved out two top prizes for feature films, one for “outstanding picture” (”Wings”) and one for “unique and artistic picture” (”Sunrise”). That second category fell by the wayside after one year.

6. Go Giamatti! Paul Giamatti wins for “The Holdovers,” as did his co-star and first-time nominee Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who has won literally every supporting actress award out there. Giamatti’s tribute to the educators in his family came straight from the heart. “It’s a movie about a teacher. I play a teacher in it. My whole family, they are teachers. All of them, going back generations. … We’ve got to respect them. They do a good thing. It’s a tough job. So this is for teachers.”

7: Go Gladstone! Lily Gladstone’s stirring best actress win for “Killers of the Flower Moon” marked the first Indigenous performance winner of the Globes, and the crowd greeted the news with true rapture. Speaking in the Blackfeet language, Gladstone’s shoutout to all the “rez kids” was a highlight of the evening. As was …

8. Andra Day and Jon Batiste, presenter MVPs: It’s the same with the Globes, the Grammys, the Oscars, the Tonys, the Whatevers: so much stilted, jokey, scripted banter delivered by two well-dressed people staring into a teleprompter. Then you get the occasional miracle, such as Andra Day and Jon Batiste, who took such obvious, easygoing delight in each other while setting up the best song and original score categories Suddenly awards-show life was good again. Compared to Koy, sweating, pushing, practically giving birth for laughs that never came, these two were arrows, pointing in the direction the show needed to go.

_________