If the Monday morning nominations were supposed to kick off the return of the Golden Globes, it was a pretty haphazard return.
In a largely untelevised announcement that lost its central gimmick (a father-daughter announcer team!) when George Lopez fell ill, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association unveiled its nominees on social media, slowly, while its broadcast network’s Los Angeles outlet, NBC, televised a few seconds of the ad without audio.
And then a happy anchor smiled and chirped, “I love award shows!”
Well maybe. But when your own network’s local outlet doesn’t even air your ad, leaving interested parties to search social media for categories as they go, that feels more like extreme caution than love.
(For the record, this was the West Coast outlet, not the East Coast outlet, where the ad was seen on the “Today” show.)
After the HFPA’s stormy last few years, you can’t blame them. But a credible set of Golden Globe nominations was supposed to be a step in the right direction, an indication that the largest (sort of), most diverse (slightly), and least non-profit (definitely) HFPA it was a demanding bunch ready to give awards based on merit.
These nominations were not enough to turn the tables; in fact, they were pretty much the same type of nominations the old HFPA always did, with glaring blind spots and oversights along with some interesting options.
Does Filipina actress Dolly de Leon fall into the supporting actress category for the satire “Triangle of Sadness” on better-known contenders? That’s great, although it’s strange that they couldn’t fit. no of the talented actresses of “Mujeres que hablando”.
Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert storm the Best Director award for the utterly bizarre “Everything Everywhere All at Once”? Fine, but an all-male list of directing nominees isn’t the best in a year that included excellent work from Sarah Polley (“Talking Women”) and Gina Prince-Bythewood (“The King Woman”), among others.
There were categories where voters did not opt for star power: Sorry, Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks, who all fell out of lists that included Jeremy Pope, Lesley Manville and Diego Calva. And there were categories where they missed irrefutably attractive newcomers like Danielle Deadwyler and Stephanie Hsu.
In the TV categories, there wasn’t much to do but scan the vast world of TV and broadcast and grab a few from Column A and a few from Column B: new shows like “Wednesday,” “The Bear,” and ” House of the Dragon” mixed with Emmy favorites like “Abbott Elementary,” “The Crown,” “Hacks,” “Only Murders in the Building” and “Ozark.” Voters also continued the trend of awarding the mammoth HBO’s “Game of Thrones” spinoff, “House of the Dragon,” while snubbing Amazon’s giant “Lord of the Rings” spinoff, “The Rings of Power.”
Starting Monday, the question was whether the sensitivity of the nominations would change due to the 103 new voters, international journalists brought in not to be full members of the HFPA, but to bolster voting ranks and help satisfy studios. and advertisers who were tired. to give in to the whims of fewer than 100 members, mostly elderly.
And judging by the nominations, those newcomers were just as idiosyncratic as the veteran voters they joined, and equally afflicted with blind spots and bias. A batch of nominations headlined by Martin McDonagh’s fun and vicious “The Banshees of Inisherin” and lawless “Everything Everywhere All at Once” isn’t a shame by any means, but the overall composition may be too masculine and too white to do. substantial damage control. for the embattled HFPA.
But hey, at least you know NBC will turn on the sound when the network airs the Golden Globes ceremony on January 10, right?
