The 2024 Golden Globes Were a Near-Total Disaster

A shaky one-year test run on a new network (CBS), the lingering radiation of a scandal that almost killed the whole enterprise, and an unknown host. These were just a few of the sinister energies looming over the 2024 Golden Globe Awards. The organization formerly known as the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which gives out the awards every year (along with a few hundred other voters, mostly from the press world), had yet another rebuilding year to contend with, post-strike and pre-rumored move to streaming. 

The most pressing trouble facing the show was the matter of who would host. The Globes once enjoyed a near-decade-long run of memorable emceeing; between Ricky Gervais’s smug iconoclasm and Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s amiable snark, the Globes’ opening remarks became must-see TV. But that era has definitively ended. The renamed HFPA’s toxic reputation seems to have scared A-list funny people away from the show, possibly forever. Last year, cult favorite comedian Jerrod Carmichael hosted the show, which resulted in Carmichael delivering a searing monologue about the very real diversity problem that has long plagued the institution. That meant this year, the Globes had to dig further down into the barrel. 

They came up with Jo Koy, a successful and long-laboring comedian who, nonetheless, is not exactly a household name for many viewers. He was a late hire, announced only a couple weeks before the ceremony. People following the various undulations of the Globes scratched their heads, but remained cautiously optimistic. Maybe someone unexpected was just what the campaign season doctors ordered. 

That optimism was near instantly dashed when Koy took the stage to open the show. A horrid, sophomoric mishmash of lazy jokes (Barbie has “big boobies”) was met with limp applause, which led to Koy going meta and commenting on the quality of the material. He threw his writers under the bus pretty much immediately, cracking that the audience was at least laughing at the one-liners he wrote. It was a sour, seemingly deathless few minutes, so bleak and awkward that I was ready to deem the entire evening a disastrous, perhaps fatal dud.

Things picked up, mildly. Some of the presenter banter was cute—Daniel Kaluuya, Shameik Moore, and Hailee Steinfeld did a very funny bit about bad writing; Kristen Wiig and Will Ferrell were silly and sublime with their musical interruption bit that ended with a “the Golden Globes have NOT changed” punchline—and the winners were largely supportable, if largely predictable. 

That said, the approach to the many of the presenting segments was bizarre. Tight and oddly dark two-shots made these presenters look like they were beaming in from an undisclosed location, perhaps as hostages. That framing lent the proceedings a frustrating air of cramped smallness. All of the stylistic tinkering that awards show producers have been doing in recent years—train stations, cabaret set designs—have not made the broadcasts cooler or more engaging as intended. They’ve had pretty much the opposite effect, making the shows seem nervous and unconfident. Last year’s Globes and Oscars were a return to normal form, so it was a shame to see the Globes regressing to needless tinkering.

There were no honorary awards given out this evening, a shame considering that those moments—Jodie Foster’s rambling not-coming-out-coming-out, Oprah Winfrey’s rousing #MeToo speech—were often the highlights of any given ceremony. What filled that gap were new awards for standup comedy and “cinematic and box office achievement,” the latter a laughably poorly defined category that seemed to have an obvious answer: the box office achievement was the movie that made the most money. (This year, Barbie.)

The standup category was presumably introduced to appeal to Netflix, and a Netflix special—Ricky Gervais’s Armageddon—indeed won. But surely the hope was also that the standup winner would give a funny speech. Whomp whomp, Gervais wasn’t there, perhaps unwilling to attend a Globes that he wasn’t hosting. So, that didn’t work out. The Globes certainly had bad luck with comedians this year.

Meanwhile, box office achievement went to, you guessed it, Barbie. A fait accompli so obvious they needn’t have bothered with the award. But it at least gave Barbie star Margot Robbie the chance to shout out the power of the theatrical experience, which Barbie and its happy complement, Oppenheimer, mightily proved this summer. Still, the award felt entirely pointless—except, of course, it’s the thing that got Taylor Swift to attend the ceremony. 

A cynical, grasping ceremony is nothing new for the Globes, but this year felt particularly desperate. A part of me had wished the night well: I love awards shows, including the forever ridiculous and problematic Globes. I think they are genuinely vital to the commercial endurance of non-blockbuster cinema. But the HFPA scrambled this year, and what resulted was a messy, irregular program that may have honored worthy winners but undermined the grandeur these things are supposed to evoke. Koy’s opening suggested a disaster in the making. The Globes, as the Globes always does, then rescued itself from complete calamity. Still, the show was steeped in sweatiness in a manner entirely unbecoming of a broadcast that used to be a flawed jewel of the season. If the Globes survive this year, and if any of us do, I hope better for all of us next time.

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