Wide Shot: Golden Globes, ‘Oppenheimer’ and a ‘hot sushi’ awards season

Hollywood had its reasons to root for the revival of the Golden Globes this year. Its status as the looser and visibly inebriated younger cousin of the Oscars offered a counterweight to the self-serious, self-congratulatory exercise of the film academy’s annual ceremony and the seemingly endless parade of precursor events.

As the industry comes out from under the cloud of two overlapping strikes lasting six months and the long tail of COVID-19, while bracing for a thinned out 2024 release calendar, the business of movies could certainly use the cheerleading and boosterism that a healthy awards season is supposed to provide.

And ratings for the Globes, which aired on CBS this year, were up.

The show drew an average of 9.4 million viewers, a 50% jump from last year’s telecast on NBC, no doubt benefiting from an NFL game as a lead-in, in addition to having plenty of celebrities in attendance and popular movies in contention. In the pre-pandemic year of 2019, the Globes had more than twice that many viewers, reaching about 19 million. (This year’s Globes also streamed on Paramount+.)

But by putting on a largely dull and predictable show, the Penske Media co-owned Globes reflected an industry going through the motions and a loss of the sense of fun that made it worth watching in the first place.

The distribution of the trophies themselves — “Oppenheimer” cleaning up with five statuettes including best motion picture drama two months before the Academy Awards and “Succession” dominating in TV a week before the Emmys — contributes to a sense of inevitability for the rest of the awards campaign.

A lot can happen before Oscars air in March, and the academy voting body of industry pros is larger than and different from the Globes’ collection of 300 journalists, but it sure looks like best picture honor is “Oppenheimer’”s to lose.

That doesn’t necessarily have to spell doom for the Oscars. “Oppenheimer” grossed almost $1 billion at the global box office, and having a top-grossing movie as a juggernaut didn’t hurt ratings for the years of “Titanic” or “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.” But conventional wisdom says you want a real race, and that hasn’t really taken shape here, absent a late surge from “The Holdovers” or something.

The Globes got the season rolling to a rocky start, with a roughly three-hour broadcast that at times acted like the energy vampire of awards shows. Comedian Jo Koy, who is no household name but has put out some popular specials, sapped any audience goodwill from the early part of the proceedings with his strained delivery of a poorly conceived opening monologue.

Worse, as Koy’s bits bombed, he blamed his writers for the bad jokes and insisted that he was responsible for the few funny ones. Have people learned nothing from Jenna Ortega? Or Joey Tribbiani? Or the WGA strike? Don’t diss your writers!

There were some enjoyable moments. The instantly memed Taylor Swift reaction shot. Charming speeches by Robert Downey Jr., Paul Giamatti and Nolan. Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig’s routine, capped by Ferrell yelling, “It smells like hot sushi in here!” Jennifer Lawrence mouthing “If I don’t win, I’m leaving” to the camera. Wins by Lily Gladstone and Da’Vine Joy Randolph.

But overall, the ratio of awkwardness to amusement was off. Awards shows tend to be mildly entertaining at best and painful at worst, and this likely didn’t whet anyone’s appetite for more.

Perhaps that’s not surprising, given the transformation of the Globes apparatus from the quirky and pliable nonprofit of international entertainment journalists known as the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. into another cog in a vertically integrated for-profit corporate entity.

Long openly mocked as a bunch of dubiously credentialed wannabes, the HFPA came in for renewed criticism after a series of Times stories detailed its history of questionable ethics and diversity failings in 2021.

The HFPA was eventually dissolved. Golden Globes co-owner Penske’s holdings include trade publications such as the Hollywood Reporter, Deadline and Variety, which rely on studios’ awards campaigns for revenue. For what its worth, business incentives did nothing to blunt the Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Feinberg’s disdain for the program itself, which he deemed “the dullest awards show I’ve ever watched.”

Despite the best efforts of the stars to liven things up, those in charge seem to have made the Golden Globes what it never wanted to be: just another awards show with fancy sushi.

Stuff we wrote

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The fight to save Faux Library, Hollywood’s top destination for fake books. Longtime prop house owner Marc Meyer, widely considered a pioneer of the fake book, is fighting to save his ‘life’s work,’ Faux Library.

Disney gains major support from investors firms to stave off Nelson Peltz. Disney has gained support from ValueAct Capital Management and Blackwells Capital in beating back attacks from Trian fund management. But the investment firms have significantly divergent ideas of how to work with the entertainment giant.

The docket:

Number of the week

The latest Annenberg Inclusion Initiative study blasted Hollywood studios for their hiring practices when it comes to film directors, saying that promises to improve diversity after George Floyd’s murder and the #StopAsianHate movement were “performative acts.”

No surprise, you might say. What about the actual numbers? The stats paint a picture of an industry that’s made modest improvements over time in the percentages of women and non-whites directing wide-release theatrical films, while still falling far short of parity with the general U.S. population.

Looking at the directors of last year’s 100 highest grossing movies domestically, 22.4 percent were people of color, rising from 20.7% in 2022. The numbers are up from 13.1% in 2015, the year of #OscarsSoWhite. Last year’s percentages are lower than in 2021 (27.3%), the year after the Floyd protests and also when there were far fewer films released because of COVID-19.

Women made up 12.1% of the directors who made the 100 highest-grossing films in 2023, up from 9% the year before. In 2018, the directors of the top-grossing movies were 4.5% female.

Film shoots

Here’s how production is shaping up, according to FilmLA data.

Best of the web

— Can we as a culture resolve to be more normal about Taylor Swift in 2024? (I’m guessing the answer is “no,” but it’s nice to have resolutions.) (Uproxx)

— A post-COVID breakout year for indie film? Deadline makes the case that 2023 was a turning point after a couple years of relative doldrums.

— Elon Musk’s use of illegal drugs, including LSD, ecstacy and ketamine, has posed worries for leaders at Tesla and SpaceX, says the Wall Street Journal.

Finally …

Thanks for the great recommendations for my writing and editing playlist. This week, I’m looking for music to play for my one-year-old that won’t make me want to claw my eyeballs out and isn’t Raffi or Ziggy Marley (both great).