The Golden Globes are very much an awards ceremony of two halves. The movie side of things is always exciting, given that the Golden Globes function as a bellwether for the Oscars. As such, from the results of last night’s ceremony we can predict that Demi Moore and The Brutalist are likely to do very well come March. This is why 90% of the headlines you’ll read about the Golden Globes this morning will be about film.
But the Golden Globes also gives out awards to television programmes. This used to be exciting too, because the Hollywood Foreign Press Association used to be so corrupt it would just hand nominations to whoever gave its members the biggest present, as was the case when Emily in Paris landed a pair of nominations in 2021 after HFPA voters were flown to France and put up in opulent hotel rooms. In terms of recognising quality, the Golden Globes were all over the place, but at least there was plenty of room for upsets.
But now the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is no more. Last year it was replaced by an organisation called the Golden Globe Foundation, which cannot be bought or sold. As such, the Golden Globes is about one thing and one thing only: forensically discerning the greatest television shows and performances of the last year. What this means in real terms is that it’s essentially now a carbon copy of the Emmys.
Which makes things immensely difficult for me, because this is supposed to be a snubs and surprises article, and there aren’t any surprises because almost everyone who won an Emmy last year also won a Golden Globe.
As with the Emmys, Shōgun won the most awards of the night. The show itself won best drama, while Hiroyuki Sanada took home best actor, Anna Sawai won best actress and Tadanobu Asano won best supporting actor. Of these, only Asano comes as a real surprise, since he was merely nominated for an Emmy last year. Nevertheless, his win is a nice surprise, since his performance – at first repellent, then oddly lovable – became the heart of the show.
Needless to say, it’s a good thing Shōgun won so many awards – a big, expensive, heavily subtitled historical drama like this proves that there is still room for prestigious television that isn’t designed to be background noise to a smartphone – but this article is meant to be about me being surprised about things, so it’s no good to me.
Or maybe I’m being dramatic. Look hard enough and there are still snubs to be found. For example, Asano was nominated against some amazing actors. He beat Jack Lowden, whose work on Slow Horses is miraculously able to walk the delicate line between Jack Bauer and Shaun of the Dead-era Simon Pegg. In a weaker year, Lowden would have romped home with a trophy.
Similarly, the work Harrison Ford does on Shrinking is equally revelatory. Worse still, had Ford won last night, it would have incredibly been his first major acting award for anything in his entire life. This feels like an accounting error. Hopefully the next and final season of Shrinking, where Ford’s character will further succumb to Parkinson’s disease, will rectify this historic wrong. And while we’re on this category, it’s worth pointing out that unlike the leading actor awards, the Golden Globes supporting actor categories aren’t sorted by genre. With this in mind, we can abandon the ‘Is The Bear a comedy?’ debate and recognise that Ebon Moss-Bachrach routinely gives the best performance on the show. What I’m trying to say is that everyone who was nominated for best supporting actor should have won.
That said, there was one snub last night that deserves to be singled out. Cristin Milioti did not win best actress for The Penguin. This is nothing short of a spectacular blunder. Yes, Jodie Foster – who won last night for True Detective: Night Country – turned in an excellent performance. But Cristin Milioti’s work on The Penguin carried the show like no other single performance on television over the last 12 months. Her standalone flashback episode Cent’Anni marked the moment where The Penguin went from tonally confused Sopranos cosplay to something genuinely remarkable, and almost all of that was down to the flashes of hurt and anger in Milioti’s eyes as she was subjected to humiliation after humiliation. Perhaps the best performance by anyone in anything all year, and the Golden Globes ignored her completely. Maybe the ceremony does still have the capacity to surprise after all.
