The Golden Globes Were a Disaster in the Worst Way Possible

For years, the Golden Globes were the tipsy cousin of awards shows. You’d see them for a few hours once a year, they’d get a little too drunk and a little too loud, but they never overstayed their welcome, and you’d go home with a good story if nothing else. But after it emerged in 2021 that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association was allegedly corrupt and racist as well as the target of frequent and often deserved mockery, the organization vowed to reform both its membership and its ways. (The HFPA was officially dissolved last year, although several winners at last night’s awards thanked the group anyway.) Sunday’s broadcast was meant to be the debut of the new, improved Globes, and while they might have been marginally more respectable, they were also something the show’s former incarnation never was: boring.

Comedian Jo Koy, who hosted the ceremony, might be quantitatively more famous than last year’s host, Jerrod Carmichael—Koy sold out Madison Square Garden just last November—but he felt painfully out of place in front of the high-powered crowd, digging himself into an immediate hole with feeble gags about Barbie’s boobs and how Kevin Costner actually showed up this year. Joke after joke fell flat, so much so that Koy was forced to acknowledge, in the middle of his opening monologue, that he was bombing. When he later tried out a we’re-all-pals-here line about how the broadcast featured fewer shots of Taylor Swift than the average NFL game, Swift stayed tight-lipped and coolly sipped her wine. (Making matters worse, Swift visibly roared when Jim Gaffigan, introducing the new award for best standup comedy special, joked that after 80 years of celebrating Hollywood stars, “you guys finally decided to invite the talented people.”) Reporter Nicole Sperling said she’d “never seen an audience rebel against an emcee so quickly.”

If the host sets the tone for the evening, then this evening’s tone was “flop sweat.” Mark Hamill, tapped to inaugurate the Globes’ new awards for Cinematic and Box Office Achievement (i.e., Best Picture That Actually Made Money), joked that it was “the only awards show with an open bar.” But the presenters and winners alike seemed almost uniformly sober, depriving the broadcast of the off-the-cuff moments that have often been its most memorable. I couldn’t tell you who won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture—Musical or Comedy last year, but I’ll never forget Christine Lahti apologizing for being late to accept her award in 1998 because she was still in the bathroom when her name was called.

With a handful of exceptions, the Globes’ presenting duos seemed ill-matched and under-rehearsed, their attempted banter built around comic discomfort that often just played as genuine awkwardness. In one scripted exchange, Costner quoted a couple of lines from America Ferrera’s climactic monologue in Barbie, and an awestruck Ferrera gushed, “Did you, Kevin Costner, memorize my womanhood speech from Barbie?” Costner held back his curt “no” for so long that it felt less like a punchline than a slap.

There were a handful of noteworthy moments in the early going, namely Succession’s Kieran Culkin using a portion of his acceptance speech for best actor to take a playful stab at a fellow HBO nominee, The Last of Us’ Pedro Pascal: “Suck it, Pedro.” But it wasn’t until Andra Day and Jon Batiste took the small, circular stage to present the awards for songwriting and score that things finally started to loosen up. Day did a double take at the teleprompter copy about her getting her start “singing in a strip … mall,” and Batiste chewed gum and shot the camera a sly smile as if he, at least, had managed to locate the open bar. Even so, when Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig made their way out, I was still dreading the possibility that even this venerable comic duo might fall on their faces, so off were the vibes. Fortunately, they managed a decent if not world-changing bit involving their involuntarily dancing to a goofy piece of music, and the evening was saved from total disaster.

In the end, the presumptive Oscar front-runner Oppenheimer cleaned up with five awards, including picture, director, actor, supporting actor, and score. On the TV side, it was a good night for both Beef and The Beef, with The Bear tying Beef’s three wins, while Succession’s final season won four. Surprises were minor, both in terms of who won and what they said. I saw more clips on my timeline of Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner canoodling in the audience than I did of anything that happened onstage.

Why even watch the Golden Globes? Because, as silly and irrelevant as they are, even with the worst show—and this was, to be clear, one of, if not the, worst in recent memory—you still get moments like Killers of the Flower Moon’s Lily Gladstone accepting her award for Best Actress in a Drama, marking the historic significance of her win by beginning her speech in the language of the Blackfeet tribe. Among other things, the Globes have often served as a kind of audition for Oscar night, and Gladstone’s moving acceptance was one academy voters might well want to see repeated in person.

Whatever the changes behind the scenes, the winners of the Globes’ brand-new awards proved that there’s still a long way to go for the organization to regain—or, really, gain—its credibility. Debuting an award for “box office achievement” feels redundant in a year when the box-office champs were also critical favorites. Barbie, the box-office award winner, didn’t need a made-up category to earn recognition, and Oppenheimer, which won the regular old Best Picture, Drama, earned nearly $1 billion on its own. The standup category was a straight-up embarrassment, with former Globes host and current transphobe Ricky Gervais emerging victorious from a pool of big-name but largely past-their-prime comics. If that was the Golden Globes’ attempt to show that they can change with the times, it landed with a bigger thud than Jo Koy’s played-out jabs about the lengthy running time of Oppenheimer. Better luck next year.