On the evening of January 3rd, local time, as a warm-up for the 82nd Golden Globe Awards, this year's Lifetime Achievement Award winners Ted Danson and Viola Davis received their trophies in advance. The ceremony was held at a hotel in Beverly Hills and was not broadcast live on television or the Internet, but related clips will be broadcast at the Golden Globe Awards ceremony held on the evening of January 5th, local time.

Golden Globes to catch up with Oscars

I believe many people have seen that this arrangement of the Golden Globe Awards is clearly imitating the way the Oscar Awards handles the Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony. Since 2009, the Oscar Awards has held a so-called Board of Governors Awards dinner for honorary award winners. It is also not broadcast live, but only edited clips are broadcasted during the Oscar Awards ceremony. According to the official statement of the Golden Globe Awards, this new policy is to express the highest respect for the Lifetime Achievement Award winners, allowing them to have enough time to enjoy the glory. But in fact, everyone knows that, just like the intention of the Board of Governors Awards dinner, this move is to shorten the length of the awards ceremony and save its declining ratings.

In addition to the Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony, this year's Golden Globe Awards also set up a luncheon for first-time nominees, which also seems to be imitating the Oscar nominees luncheon, which has always been one of the awards season events that Hollywood media pays special attention to. Filmmakers nominated for the new Oscars will dress up and attend, trying every means to increase their popularity under the spotlight. The Golden Globe Awards have obviously gained some inspiration from it.

This year's Golden Globe Awards promotional campaign, like the previous one, emphasized in the promotional copy how luxurious the official gift packages provided to the winners are. According to reports, the winners can choose 9 gifts from 25 gifts with a total value of more than 1 million US dollars, including famous Scottish gin, a facial mask treatment with the latest technology, a stem cell facelift worth 40,000 US dollars, a holiday trip to Finland's northern lights worth 48,000 US dollars, a jungle adventure in Bali, and a three-day and two-night trip to Tasmania.

According to official statements, after the awards ceremony, each winner will receive a suede handbag "with a detachable shoulder strap", plus a list detailing the gifts and their monetary value, but since many gifts are limited in number, first come first served. Interestingly, this year, Kate Winslet ("Political" and "Lee"), Sebastian Stan ("Apprentice" and "Different Men") and Selena Gomez ("Emilia Perez" and "Only Murder in the Building") received two nominations, but even if any of them can hold two trophies at the same time, according to convention, there is only one chance to get a gift, and only 9 gifts can be selected.

Each winner will receive a suede handbag.

According to the American media, the Golden Globe Awards, which has been reborn, has emphasized in its publicity that the luxurious gifts it provides to the winners are of great value, and its purpose is to compete with the Academy Awards. Because distributing luxurious gift bags to all nominees has always been a regular program before the Oscars ceremony. For example, at the 96th Academy Awards held in 2024, the gift bag was priced at $178,000.

The nomination list continues to diversify

Hollywood media have generally highly recognized these new initiatives and high-profile publicity of the Golden Globe Awards, almost making people forget that just over two years ago, this historic Hollywood awards event had already become notorious and became the target of boycotts by the entire industry. On the one hand, this is because the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which originally organized the Golden Globe Awards, actually died in 2023, and was replaced by Todd Boehly, the owner of the Premier League Chelsea Club and an American businessman with a net worth of $8.5 billion, and Jay Penske, Hollywood's leading media tycoon. They officially joined forces in 2020 and currently control a number of Hollywood entertainment media including The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Independent Online, and Rolling Stone. From this perspective, the Golden Globe Awards and the above-mentioned media have now become a family, and it is also expected that the overall image tends to be positive.

On the other hand, the reason why the Golden Globe Awards were notorious in the first place was mainly because of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's lack of minority members and lack of financial transparency, as reported by the Los Angeles Times. For a time, all the major Hollywood film studios, public relations companies, and even film and television actors boycotted it. NBC stopped broadcasting it, and celebrities such as Tom Cruise even returned their trophies. However, after the new owner took over, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has been disbanded and replaced by a jury of 334 film critics from all over the world. In addition, the number of candidates for each award has also increased from five to six, all in order to make the final nomination list and winners list more diverse and in line with Hollywood's political correctness requirements.

Sure enough, the nomination list for the last Golden Globe Awards was quite diverse, and in some ways even more up-to-date than the Oscars, resulting in great improvements in ratings and media reviews. The situation is almost the same this time. On the one hand, the most nominated films, Emilia Perez (10) and Brutalism (7), are important works at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and Venice Film Festival respectively. In addition, A Certain Material, which won the Cannes Film Festival Best Screenplay Award, and Imagination Light, which won the Cannes Jury Grand Prix, were also nominated for the Golden Globe Awards this year, reflecting that the Golden Globe Awards jury is now more international and younger than in the past.

"Emilia Perez" received the most nominations with 10.

It is worth mentioning that the 10 nominations of "Emilia Perez" also surpassed the 9 nominations received by "Barbie" in 2023 and "Cabaret" in 1972, and is second only to "Nashville", which received 11 Golden Globe nominations in 1975. However, "Nashville" only won one Best Original Song Award in the end, and "Emilia Perez" still has the opportunity to win more awards.

After the list of nominees for this year's Golden Globe Awards was released, a few media people lamented that several outstanding black actors, such as Marianne Jean-Baptiste in "The Hard Truth", Danielle Deadwyler in "The Piano", Clarence Maclin in "Prison Opera", Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in "Five Cents Boy", and these films themselves were all ignored. However, after all, there were also black actors such as Zendaya (The Challenger), Denzel Washington (Gladiator 2) and Colman Domingo (Prison Opera) nominated, so the old saying that "the Golden Globe Awards are too white" did not cause much waves in the end.

The remaining complaints mainly focused on the fact that Steve McQueen, the director of "The Flash", and Saoirse Ronan, the director of "Dune 2", Denis Villeneuve, and Jon M. Chu, the director of "Wicked", were not nominated. However, because this year's director nomination list included two women, Coralie Farria of "Some Kind of Material" and Payal Kapadia of "Imagine", the outside world did not boycott the fact that several male directors were not on the list.

Dune 2 poster

Warner Bros. did not submit a box office achievement award for Dune 2

Another controversial situation is that in the last year's newly established Best Box Office Achievement Award, the name of "Dune 2" was not included in the eight nominated films this year. According to the regulations, this award is intended to recognize "the most acclaimed, highest-grossing and/or most-watched films of the year"; to be eligible for nomination, the total box office of the film must reach 150 million US dollars, of which the total box office in North America must reach at least 100 million US dollars; or it must be a streaming work with corresponding ratings. This year, "Dune 2" produced by Warner fully met its box office data requirements, but it did not receive this nomination. The reason is that Warner deliberately chose not to submit the film to participate in the competition in this category.

According to sources, the reason why Warner did not sign up is because it felt that the so-called box office achievement award was only established in the second year and lacked sufficient status. If Dune 2 really won this award, it might be considered as a kind of "consolation prize", which would affect its chances of competing for the Oscars in the future. I believe many people still remember that the producer of the previous winner of this award, Barbie, was Warner. Barbie received 9 Golden Globe nominations, but only won the Best Song and Box Office Achievement Awards. In the subsequent Oscars, Barbie also received 8 nominations, but only won one Best Song Award. Warner was worried that this kind of Golden Globe "consolation prize" would have a counter-productive effect on publicity, and it is no wonder that Warner decided not to allow Dune 2 to sign up for this category this year.

Of course, the Golden Globe Awards, which were and are voted on by the media, are not a great predictor of the Oscars. In the past 15 years, the Golden Globe Best Picture has only coincided with the Oscar seven times, which is not even as good as the Critics' Choice Awards, which have coincided with the Oscar nine times in 15 years.