The 81st annual ceremony saw the period biopic win five awards, while Succession led the TV side with four.
Last summer’s Barbenheimer phenomenon continued into the Golden Globes on Sunday night, with Barbie taking home best cinematic achievement and Oppenheimer best drama, while Yorgos Lanthimos’s absurdist film Poor Things won for Best Comedy at the first major Awards Show of the year.
The 81st annual Golden Globes were a breezy return to form after a February 2021 investigation by the Los Angeles Times found that the Globes-governing Hollywood Foreign Press Association had no Black members and numerous corruption issues.
The three-hour ceremony at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles marked the first ceremony since the Hollywood Foreign Press Association was disbanded, sold to a private equity firm and Dick Clark Productions, and reformed with a diverse body of 300 international members representing 76 countries.
And the Filipino-American comedian Jo Koy, a last-minute pick for host announced just two weeks before the ceremony, stuck to his promise for an uncontroversial ceremony. Unlike Jerrod Carmichael’s relatively edgy hosting work last year, Koy avoided mention of politics and opted for easy swings at the nominees – amongs them.
Nominated for her blockbuster concert film, Swift lost the inaugural award for cinematic and box office achievement to Barbie, the first female-directed movie to make over $1bn at the box office. “We would like to dedicate this to every single person on the planet who dressed up and went to the greatest place on earth: the movie theatre,” said star Margot Robbie while accepting the award. The night’s other new award, best stand-up comedy performance on TV, went to British comedian Ricky Gervais for his special Armageddon.
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Though defeated in the best director and screenplay races, Barbie, the most nominated of the evening with nine nods, also won best original song for Billie Eilish and her brother/producer Finneas’s somber hit What Was I Made For? Poor Things scored an upset with best comedy, as well as best actress for Emma Stone’s bizarro coming of age as Bella Baxter.
Oppenheimer collected the most awards of the night with five, including best drama, best actor for Cillian Murphy, best score for Ludwig Göransson and best supporting actor for Robert Downey Jr. Best director Christopher Nolan acknowledged the last time he accepted a Golden Globe, on behalf of the late Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight. “I thought it would be simpler accepting for myself,” he said, “but I can only accept this on behalf of people. As directors, we bring people together and we try to get them to give their best.”
Oppenheimer’s main rival for drama, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, scored one award for Lily Gladstone as best actress. Gladstone, the first Indigenous actor to be nominated, let alone win, in the category, began her acceptance speech in the Blackfeet language. “I’m so grateful that I can speak even a little bit of my language,” she said, noting how Indigenous actors used to have their English lines played backwards as Native speech.
“This is for every little rez kid, every little urban kid, every little Native kid out there who has a dream, who is seeing themselves represented by ourselves, in our words,” she added.
We congratulate the nominees this year.
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