Notes from a Night at the Golden Globes
I wasn't there. I mean from my couch.
Here are my notes on some awards to remember and a night to (mostly) forget…
Emma Stone is Back
Would you believe it if I told you Emma Stone has only been in 4 movies since 2019, and one of them was Cruella, and another was The Croods: A New Age? It’s been five long, cold, depressing years since Emma Stone was nominated for her tremendous performance in The Favourite. But it’s 2023, she’s one of America’s biggest movie stars, she is back, and we are so back.
This year, she exploded back on the scene with a tremendous performance as the Frankensteinian Bella Baxter in Poor Things.
Her win at the Globes and her resulting awards show presence reminded me why she is such an important personality in Hollywood. Emma Stone is a movie star, and she knows it. And because she’s won Best Actress before, she knows how to give a winning speech. Even her awkward walk up to the stage has now been endlessly shared on Twitter.
Here are some of my favorite moments from her speech:
The classic “Oh my god we only have a few seconds” left in this speech directly after starting
Doing an Australian accent for Tony McNamara; she’s quirky. Remember!
The incredibly sweet and almost sexually charged stare into Yorgos Lanthimos’ eyes while saying, “I’ll forever be grateful that we met”
The genuinely loving and moving tribute to her character! “I see this as a rom-com… Bella falls in love with life itself. She accepts the good and the bad in equal measure.” Which is a great interpretation on the movie and a great lesson in general.
Movie Stars Are Important
After a flaccid and deeply uncomfortable opening monologue, Robert Downey Jr. came in to save the day with a coked-out, “beta-blocked” acceptance speech that reminds us that if you have enough star power and enough clout within the community, you can get up there and say almost anything and everyone will clap like monkeys.
Jennifer Lawrence reminded everyone she was a movie star by going for it in her refreshingly funny summer comedy No Hard Feelings. She brought the true Jennifer Lawrence awards show energy when taking only 4 seconds on the screen to mouth that she would leave the show if she didn’t win her award. Spoiler alert: she didn’t win. But what did win is the power that movie stars have to take mere seconds on screen and exploit them in order to create a moment. In sports terms, her +/- was astronomical. Put Jennifer Lawrence in movies so she can be at awards shows!
Famous, seasoned comedians who are also movie stars are funny and would make good hosts
What was most striking about Jo Koy’s never-ending comedic nightmare was the abundance of funny people in the audience and presenting awards throughout the night. It would be like if the 1996 Bulls played a scrimmage during halftime of your 8-year-old son’s little league basketball game. Jim Gaffigan made a classic joke about how the entertainment industry is full of pedophiles with his typical sardonic tone and capped it off with a self-deprecating ode to stand-up comedians. But the bit of the night came from two of our premiere comedians- Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig. They were super weird together, dancing to a song that I now can’t get out of my head. People in the audience actually seemed to be laughing at them. Everyone was genuinely transfixed by two comedic performers being ridiculous on stage- what comedy generally is supposed to be!
The lesson here seems to be: let comedians cook. And more specifically, famous, seasoned, confident comedians who are also movie stars make really great hosts and presenters because the audience trusts them already and can ultimately just point at them, chuckle, and say, “hey! There’s Will Ferrell from my favorite movie Talledega Nights dancing on stage with Kristen Wiig, that lady who was great on SNL and the 2011 classic Bridesmaids.”
Ray Romano and Keri Russell, hot couple, with rom-com potential
Keri Russell is beautiful, and Ray Romano, despite sounding like a post-pubescent Kermit frog, brought the energy of a hot divorced dad not dissimilar from Steve Carrell in Crazy, Stupid, Love. It’s like the more pathetic and lonely he gets, the hotter he becomes. Their pre-award banter was very funny, and the air was thick as a brick with sexual tension. The side-to-side glances from Keri Russell. The nervous forehead wipes from Ray Romano. It was just a fantastic audition tape for a rom-com. I credit my friend Alex Chanen for identifying this almost immediately, and he’s absolutely correct. Who needs the uber hot but dull energy from Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell when you could have the beautifully aging Keri Russell falling out of love with the sweaty but handsome Ray Romano only for them to realize that the family they built together in Queens is too important and that in this wild world, they are the only people meant for each other. I mean come on, WHO SAYS NO!?
Beef, Succession, and The Bear were the shows of the year
In a year where the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes delayed and canceled shows and dampened an already weak 2023 lineup, three shows dominated the Golden Globes (and rightfully so).
In Limited Series, Beef swept Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Series and provided us with some truly delightful moments (Steven Yeun joking about Frozen and his daughter) and slightly weirder ones (the close-up of Ali Wong and Bill Hader kissing). All in all, it was great to see such a beloved and unique show take home so many awards.
The Succession wins were bittersweet, reminding every fan how indelible and sumptuous each and every character on that show was. Watching Kieran Culkin squirm and rustle his hands through his hair, Matthew Macfadyen cooly and unceremoniously accept his award, and Sarah Snook burst onto the stage with such energy, emotion, and a strange mix of an American, English, and Australian accent was pure bliss. Kieran Culkin especially, who was so in his Roman Roy bag that he might as well have been thrust on stage five minutes after a sexually charged interaction with Jeryd Menken in the bathroom of a South Carolina Hilton at the Republican National Convention. It transported all of us back to the better Sunday nights on HBO when we got to watch each of these actors bounce off of each other. The only thing that could’ve made it better would have been reaction shots from Jeremy Strong and Brian Cox whose presences were sorely missed.
Another great moment of the night came from Ayo Edebiri, who ran on stage legitimately vibrating. She thanked everyone, but most importantly, she thanked her manager’s assistants. This got a huge applause, which is good because assistants work hard and are rarely acknowledged in a meaningful way. It also further proves my theory that Ayo is “one of us” in that she seems like a real person who has hopes, dreams, and insecurities and can identify with the genuinely strange parts of Hollywood and the real people behind the scenes that make stuff happen. It was also cool to see Lionel Boyce and the entire cast accept their Best TV Series- Musical or Comedy award. Despite how horrendous the vibes can often be on The Bear, it has the ultimate great vibes cast with a bunch of people you would run in front of a moving train for. I can’t wait to see it win many more awards for many more years.
I’m glad Barbie got an award but why are we awarding a quantitative metric?
So a common complaint about these awards shows is that they just award small movies that no one watched or cares about except a small cabal of film dorks (me included) who spend all their time in dark rooms writing Letterboxd reviews. Fair. So, the way to remedy this, according to the producers of the Golden Globes, was to introduce a new award for “Cinematic and Box Office Achievement.” Barbie won this award. Which makes sense, because Barbie made the most money this year at the box office. Which also proves why this award is deeply strange and pointless. The truest indicator of Box Office Achievement is not the Golden Globes but the $1.5 billion Barbie made at the Box Office! It would be like NBA giving out a “Best Scorer” award at the end of every season and just giving it to the guy who scored the most points. Like, yeah! We get it! Don’t get me wrong. Barbie deserved all the accolades for being a great movie that many people trekked to the movie theaters to see. But I’m not sure they needed a golden statue to prove it when they have a very, very large wad of cash instead.
A Poor Things pre-Oscar boost
The Oscars seem very locked up at this point. In that, it appears that Oppenheimer will win Best Picture and probably Best Director. Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Robert Downey Jr. will win supporting actor and actress awards, and Lily Gladstone and Cillian Murphy will win best actress and actor, respectively. However, a strong showing from the recently released Poor Things has the chance to shake things up heading into the Academy Awards. Emma Stone’s win in Best Female Actor Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy (a mouthful) locks her and Lily Gladstone into a two-person race. And Poor Things beating American Fiction and Barbie signals that voters responded to it and received it like a serious awards contender. I liked Poor Things A TON and hope its medium-to-big night will inspire more folks to check it out. At this point, I don’t see anything dethroning Oppenheimer for Best Picture, but if Poor Things starts garnering more commercial attention and builds momentum leading into March, anything is possible.
Lily Gladstone is why awards shows exist
The best speech of the night came from Lily Gladstone after winning Best Female Actor for Motion Picture, Drama. She got up on stage and spoke Blackfeet language. She also recognized the importance of speaking the Blackfeet language not just as a means of representation but because Hollywood films used to record actors speaking in English and then play the recording backward for Native American dialogue. So Lily Gladstone getting up there and speaking her native tongue is not just representation but its reclamation. Which ultimately is what Killers of the Flower Moon is about. It is shining a big bright light on the atrocities of white Americans who co-opted, erased, and stole Native American land and culture. And yes, Ernest Burkhart, William Hale, and the Oklahomans who stole and murdered the Osage for their land are beyond evil. But Gladstone’s speech reminds us that in its own way, Hollywood is culpable too.
She thanked Martin Scorsese, Bob DeNiro, Leonardo Dicaprio, and Eric Roth for being good allies. She dedicated the speech to “res kids and native kids” out there who have a dream. And the audience, much like the audience throughout Killers of the Flower Moon, could not stop watching her. Her soft intensity was gripping, signaling to everyone in the room that it was her time to be heard, their time to listen. Lily Gladstone made her case for Best Actress in her staggering performance but cemented her probable win at the Oscars with her speech on Sunday night.