3 takeaways from Sunday's Golden Globes
"One Battle After Another" producer Sara Murphy and writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson accept a best motion picture award at Sunday's Golden Globes, with cast members in the back, from left: Benicio Del Toro, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti, Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn, and presenter Julia Roberts. Credit: CBS Broadcasting via AP / Kevork Djansezian
The 83rd Golden Globes unfolded Sunday night with all the usual trappings: stars in fabulous outfits, tearful acceptance speeches and jokes about plastic surgery from second-time host Nikki Glaser. Between the lines, though, one could read a few subtler messages. Here are three:
Original movies are not dead. That was proved by several fresh, non-formulaic films that had strong showings at the Globes. "One Battle After Another," Paul Thomas Anderson’s genre-straddling satirical thriller, came away with four awards. "Sinners," a horror-musical with few obvious precedents, won two, as did the inventive animated hit "KPop Demon Hunters." And Rose Byrne won an acting award for "If I Had Legs I’d Kick You," an art-house title that blended psychological horror with dark comedy. All now seem likely to become Oscar nominees, too.
Some awards are better than others. One of the Globes that went to "Sinners" was Cinematic and Box Office Achievement, whose stated purpose is to decorate "the year’s most acclaimed, highest-earning and/or most viewed films," according to Golden Globe rules. In reality, it’s a consolation prize for movies that drew large audiences but don’t seem substantial enough to win anything else. Nevertheless, director Ryan Coogler seemed happy just to be onstage, especially given the vicissitudes of the film business: "It was an honor on this movie to know that it was getting a theatrical release," he said in his acceptance speech.
There’s life after Warner Bros. Speaking of vicissitudes, the potential sale of the storied Hollywood studio to Netflix must be one of the most widely discussed and closely watched deals in Hollywood history. It feels like the end of an era. And yet, watching Sunday's Globes, it felt like the deal was all but done and folks were already moving on. Glaser’s opening joke about auctioning Warner off for five bucks was greeted with laughs, not tears, and nobody used an acceptance speech to bemoan the studio’s fate (perhaps because Netflix honcho Ted Sarandos was there, sitting next to Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav). Remember when MGM, co-founded by Louis B. Mayer in 1924, became a subsidiary of Amazon? As Scarlett O’Hara once said, "After all, tomorrow is another day."
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