A shaky year-long test run on a new network (CBS), the ongoing airing of a scandal that nearly brought down the entire company, and an unknown host. These were just some of the dark energies emerging at the 2024 Golden Globe Awards. The organization formerly known as the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which hands out the awards each year (along with a few hundred other voters, mostly from the press world), faced another year of rebuilding after the strike and rumored move to streaming .
The show's most pressing issue was who would host. The Globes once enjoyed a nearly decade-long streak of unforgettable hosting performances; between Ricky Gervais's smug iconoclasm and Tina Fey And Amy PoehlerHis endearing mockery made the Globes opening speeches must-see television. But this era is finally over. The toxic reputation of the renamed HFPA appears to have turned high-profile, funny people off the show, perhaps forever. Last year's cult favorite comedian Jerrod Carmichael hosted the show, which resulted in Carmichael delivering a sharp monologue about the very real diversity problem that has long plagued the institution. That meant the Globes had to dig deeper into their pockets this year.
They came up with it Jo Koy, a successful and long-standing comedian who is not exactly well known to many viewers. He was a late hire and wasn't announced until a few weeks before the ceremony. People following the various ripples of the globes scratched their heads but remained cautiously optimistic. Maybe someone unexpected was just what the doctors ordered during the campaign season.
That optimism was dashed almost immediately when Koy took the stage to open the show. A terrible, juvenile mix of lazy jokes (Barbie has “big breasts”) was met with weak applause, leading to Koy going meta and commenting on the quality of the material. He pretty much immediately threw shade at his writers, claiming that audiences at least laughed at the one-liners he wrote. They were bitter, seemingly immortal minutes, so bleak and embarrassing that I was prepared to consider the whole evening a disastrous, perhaps fatal dud.
Things picked up, at least slightly. Some of the host's jokes were sweet –Daniel Kaluuya, Shameik MooreAnd Hailee Steinfeld made a very funny post about bad writing; Kristen Wiig And Will Ferrell were silly and great with their musical interruption that ended with the punchline “The Golden Globes have NOT changed” — and the winners were largely acceptable, if largely predictable.
However, the approach to the many lecture segments was bizarre. The terse and strangely bleak two-shots made these presenters look as if they were beaming in from an unknown location, perhaps as hostages. This setting gave the proceedings a frustrating atmosphere of cramped smallness. All the stylistic tweaks that awards show producers have made in recent years — train stations, cabaret sets — haven't made the broadcasts cooler or more engaging as intended. They had pretty much the opposite effect, making the shows feel nervous and uncertain. Last year's Globes and Oscars were a return to normalcy, so it was a shame to see the Globes degenerate into unnecessary tinkering.
There were no honorary awards this evening, a shame considering these moments…Jodie Foster's rambling not-coming-out-coming-out-coming-out, Oprah Winfrey“'s rousing #MeToo speech – were often the highlight of every ceremony. What filled that void were new awards for standup comedy and “film and box office success,” the latter being a ridiculously ill-defined category to which there seemed to be an obvious answer: box office success was the film that made the most money brought in. (This year Barbie.)
The stand-up category was presumably introduced to appeal to Netflix, and a Netflix special – Armageddon by Ricky Gervais – actually won. But certainly there was also hope that the standup winner would give a funny speech. Ugh, Gervais wasn't there, perhaps because he wasn't ready to attend the Globes, which he wasn't hosting. So that didn't work. The Globes certainly had bad luck with comedians this year.