Every nominations day triggers an avalanche of reactions, from celebrities’ earnest responses to the “honour” of being nominated, to the head-scratching questions of “her…?”.
It was a big year for Australian performers Rose Byrne, Joel Edgerton and Jacob Elordi while Leonardo DiCaprio’s universally acclaimed One Battle After Another was the most nominated film, setting it up to dominate the Oscars later in the awards season.
The Golden Globes are a strange pre-cursor awards in that there is no crossover with Oscars voters, but can create momentum for a strong campaign to the most coveted statuette in the business.
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Hopefuls such as Timothee Chalamet, Michael B. Jordan, Jessie Buckley and George Clooney will be looking to springboard any Globes success straight onto that Oscars red carpet.
Still, it’s not fun unless you get to judge the Globes voters’ choices, that’s half the point of any glitzy awards, which will be broadcast on January 12 with Nikki Glaser returning as host.
Here are the big takeaways from this year’s Globes nominations.
GREEN FOR GOLD
It was a fantastic year for Australians because not only were four of them nominated in the high-profile acting categories, three of the four were for films and are real Oscar contenders.
Rose Byrne nabs a nod for her visceral performance in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, a stressful film about the mother of a sick child trapped in a spiraling breakdown when everything starts to pile on.
Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Credit: Supplied
She’s looking particularly strong in her category of best actress in a musical or comedy, even up against the likes of Emma Stone for Bugonia and Chase Infiniti for One Battle After Another.
Byrne is well-liked and respected in Hollywood, and has over decades proven her versatility across genres. This year, she also generated good will for her role in the second season of Platonic, which kept her top of mind and in the conversation.
Joel Edgerton is nominated for his quiet and considered performance in Train Dreams, a drama about an American logger, and the tragedy and beauty of an ordinary life. Edgerton’s fiercest competition are Michael B. Jordan for his dual role as twins in Sinners, and Wagner Moura in the Brazilian film The Secret Agent.
As we saw last year with surprise Globes winner Fernanda Torres, who went on to win the Oscar for I’m Still Here, there is a strong Brazilian support base among Globes voters.
Jacob Elordi is actually a double nominee for the Globes this year, notching up nods for supporting actor in a film for his role as the Creature in Frankenstein, and for his lead performance in the Australian miniseries The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
Australian actor Jacob Elordi is a double nominee. Credit: Lia Toby/Getty Images for Netflix
No offence to the great series recognised at the Globes, but this is one awards show where TV is definitely second tier. Everyone is paying attention to the film categories, and the Globes sit at a weird time on the calendar to when the Emmys (the real TV awards) take place.
Still, as a country, we’re 100 per cent behind Sarah Snook, who is nominated for her lead performance in All Her Fault, a pulpy drama about a young mother whose son is abducted, exposing the rifts in her family and the unfair pressures placed on women.
A JOKE OF A CATEGORY
Now in its third year, can we please stop pretending the Cinematic and Box Office Achievement category has any business existing?
A favourite quote is the moment in Mad Men when Don Draper yells at Peggy who is sulking about missing out on awards recognition, “That’s what the money is for!”.
The concept of a consolation prize for a commercially successful movie that wasn’t quite good enough to be nominated in the main categories should be offensive if studios weren’t obsessed with slapping a “Golden Globe winner” tag on marketing posters.
Last year, Dune: Part Two, despite making more than $US700 million, didn’t put itself forward for this. Years ago, the Oscars flirted with a similar idea and was resoundingly shouted down.
The nominees this year are Avatar: Fire and Ash, F1, KPop Demon Hunters (also nominated in animated feature), Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Sinners (also nominated in best picture drama), Weapons, Wicked: For Good and Zootopia 2 (also nominated in animated feature).
A couple of very strange inclusions here. First, Avatar: Fire and Ash, which has yet to be released so has technically not reached the eligibility criteria of a minimum $US150 million box office. As it stands, Avatar: Fire and Ash has made zero dollars.
There’s a carve-out where movies released after November 22 can use “projected” earnings, so, OK, sure. If Avatar made less than that threshold, it would become the biggest box office bomb in history.
KPop Demon Hunters is was oddly nominated in the “box office achievement” category. Credit: Netflix/Sony Pictures
The other one is KPop Demon Hunters, which was released on streaming, and only played in cinemas for a couple of weekends in stunt promotions. But the rules technically cover “commensurate digital streaming viewership”.
There’s no doubt that KPop Demon Hunters is the biggest movie of the year on streaming, and it is actually a great film (and was recognised as such in the animated feature category), there’s something not right about counting streaming numbers in a category that literally has box office in the title.
At a time when cinema-going is under immense challenge, especially with the potential acquisition of Warner Bros by Netflix, movies that didn’t have even the smallest release window at premiere shouldn’t be anywhere near film awards. That’s what the Emmys – and the money – is for.
Everyone knows this category is a joke, shut it down.
WICKED: FOR GOOD WAS NOT ‘SNUBBED’
One of the biggest narratives today is that Wicked: For Good was “snubbed” by not showing up in the best picture musical or comedy category, nabbing only the pretender box office achievement one.
It also got two nominations in original song, and one each for stars Cynthia Erivo in best actress musical or comedy and Ariana Grande in best supporting actress musical or comedy.
Let’s leave aside the blatant category fraud (usually when a lead or co-lead actor goes for a supporting gong) to run Grande in supporting when her character Glinda has the meatier storyline and equal if not more screentime in this second film, a problem that will also carry over to the Oscars.
Wicked For Good was kind of bad. Credit: Giles Keyte/Universal Pictures
Wicked: For Good was nominated in the categories it should be nominated in. Those performances are fine, maybe even good, and Erivo’s category isn’t a strong field.
But you could make an argument that maybe someone like Regina Hall for One Battle After Another or Gwyneth Paltrow and Odessa A’Zion, who all gave proper supporting performances, not a co-lead, were squeezed out for Grande. OK, so maybe we haven’t left the category fraud aside quite yet. It’s fraud!
The film itself though, wasn’t “snubbed” because it just wasn’t very good.
There certainly is no critical consensus as there was for the first film. Its Rotten Tomatoes score is sitting at 67 per cent while Metacritic has it at 58 per cent.
Among the common criticisms is that it doesn’t have the dynamism of the first film, that its performances apart from Erivo and Grande were weak, and that the structure was disjointed and the dialogue weak. It also had no memorable songs or big moments, which reflects the long-held view of the latter half of the stage show.
Just because the first movie was beloved doesn’t mean you get an automatic re-entry the following year.
The overwhelming “snubbed” reaction might also reflect that American media forget that Wicked is bigger in the US than it is internationally, with most of its box office coming from North America.
Which leads us to the next point.
INTERNATIONAL INVASION
Up until two years ago, following the reckoning that plagued the Globes as an organisation without any black members among other ethically questionable practices, the awards were voted on by fewer than 100 people.
They were the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, who worked for international publications but were primarily based in Los Angeles. After the awards were sold to Penske Media, it diversified its voting body with film critics associated with FIPRESCI, which draws from all over the world.
Stellan Skarsgard and Elle Fanning in Norwegian film Sentimental Value. Credit: Madman
That expanded base has absolutely been reflected in the nominees. Out of the 10 films up for the two most prestigious awards of the night, best film drama and best film comedy or musical, half of them are non-English language.
There’s the Iranian political thriller It Was Just an Accident, whose director Jafar Panahi had earlier this month an arrest warrant issued against him by the Iranian government for “propaganda” activities. Panahi was also nominated for a Globes directing gone.
As was Joachim Trier, the Norwegian auteur behind Sentimental Value, which nabbed a drama feature nomination as well as for its stars Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgard, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Elle Fanning.
Brazil’s The Secret Agent was nominated for drama feature too, while in the comedy or musical category, Korean satire No Other Choice showed up (and its star, Lee Byung-hun, got an acting nom), as did Nouvelle Vague, a French-language co-production between France and the US.
The strength of international films in these American movie awards have continued to grow in recent years as they keep showing up in categories beyond international feature.
No Other Choice was nominated for three Golden Globes. Credit: Madman
That they made up half of the top Globes nominees, and most of them also had nominations in acting, directing, screenplay and musical score is really notable. This year more than any before it.
Not for nothing, in the animated feature category, even half of those nominees (Arco, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – Infinity Castle, and Little Amelie or the Character of Rain) were non-English language movies.
American films have some stiff competition, and it’s not going to end.
