What the Golden Globes Gets Right
What the Golden Globes Gets Right
The morning after the Golden Globe Awards is a time for two questions: “They gave the award to WHAT?” and “Why can’t the Oscars be more like this?”
The Golden Globes has long been Hollywood’s least credible awards show and also its most fun. That was true once again this year, with head-scratching wins for the critically panned “Bohemian Rhapsody” as dramatic motion picture and, as best motion picture, musical or comedy, “Green Book,” a movie that’s not a musical, not a comedy, and not the best of anything.
Yet the show floated along on its own lack of pretension. So what if hosts Andy Samberg and Sandra Oh’s jokes were as inconsistent as the choices of winners? Ms. Oh’s palpable nervousness was endearing, Carol Burnett’s acceptance of a lifetime achievement award was touching, Glenn Close’s speech was stirring, and the hugging and chatting and cheering by film and television stars packed together at tables right in front of the stage made viewers feel like they’re part of a party.
The Globes does everything right that the Oscars does wrong. It doesn’t give awards to below-the-line categories like sound editing and costume design that, while important, don’t belong on a prime-time TV event. It still gives lifetime-achievement awards during the ceremony to aging stars whom audiences love. It mixes film and TV awards, which makes more sense every year as the lines between different types of content and the caliber of stars who make them blur on our digital devices.
Most important, the Globes doesn’t take itself seriously. How could it, when the winners are selected by about 90 foreign entertainment journalists who write celebrity profiles when they’re not being aggressively lobbied by Hollywood publicists and schmoozed by stars in the months leading up the show? The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has made some dubious choices over the years—does anyone look back and think “Forrest Gump” was the best picture in a year that also delivered “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Pulp Fiction?”—but at least the Oscars are voted on by 9,000-plus professionals who know what it takes to make a great movie.
And if the trends of the past few years continue, ratings for the Golden Globes could eventually exceed those of the Oscars. (Preliminary ratings indicated that Sunday night’s Globes viewership was slightly down from the previous year.)
That’s because the Globes’s frivolity and popularity aren’t a contradiction. They go hand-in-hand. The atmosphere in the hotel ballroom is jovial and lighthearted because everyone in Hollywood knows that winning, or losing, doesn’t actually signify anything about their artistic merit.
The fun is evident on-screen, which makes for a better experience than the high stakes and occasional smugness of the Oscars. Because the Academy is trying so hard to honor the art and craft of filmmaking, it packs the prime-time Oscars full of categories that simply aren’t interesting to most people and has relegated lifetime-achievement honors for stars many of us would love to see reflect on their careers, like Cicely Tyson and Donald Sutherland, to an untelevised event held months earlier.
With its near-manic efforts to diversify and lower the average age of its membership, as well as the aborted attempt to create a “best popular film” category, the organizers of the Oscars are desperate to find ways to honor more movies that people actually watch.
The Globes got around that this year by honoring a movie of questionable greatness. Say what you will about “Bohemian Rhapsody,” more people have watched it than any Oscar-winning best picture since 2003’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.”
It isn’t like anybody’s going to spend time wringing their hands over how “Bohemian Rhapsody” got that prize. After all, it’s just what 90 foreign entertainment journalists thought.
The Oscars has the credibility that the Golden Globes lack but can’t manage to put on a show that’s nearly as good. While the Academy hems and haws about whether it can trim at least one of the three short-film categories from its show or what to do about movies that premiere on streaming platforms, the Globes are eating the Oscars’ lunch.
Is it too much to ask that in an industry devoted to giving audiences what they want, we could get an awards show that’s fun to watch and whose choices we can take seriously?
Write to Ben Fritz at ben.fritz@wsj.com
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