There was never any reason to take the Golden Globes seriously, but it took a series of damning revelations about the group behind the awards, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (H.F.P.A.), to threaten its prime-time network-broadcast slot and its prominence in the movie industry. In recent months, it has emerged that the H.F.P.A.’s roster of ninety members includes not a single Black person; that Philip Berk, its former president, called Black Lives Matter a “racist hate movement”; that it may have broken financial regulations by channelling funds to its members; and that some members seem to be unduly swayed by swag and junkets. On Monday, NBC, the network that has been airing the Golden Globes since 1995, announced that it won’t do so in 2022, but the move was far from proactive. Rather, the network’s hand was virtually forced as other major industry entities and figures distanced themselves from the awards in recent days. Tom Cruise sent his three trophies back to the organization, Scarlett Johansson called on Hollywood to spurn the group, and Netflix, WarnerMedia, and Amazon announced that they’d be boycotting the ceremony.
The H.F.P.A. has vowed to become more inclusive, but it is beset by much more than its homogenous makeup. The group, which has been doling out its awards since 1944, is known for a membership that is easily manipulable. As the Los Angeles Times reported, “Winning favor with a tiny pool of fewer than 90 H.F.P.A. voters is far easier logistically than tackling the film academy’s 10,300 members, of whom roughly 9,400 are eligible to vote on the Oscars, or the more than 25,000 members of the Television Academy,” which determines the Emmys. The public, however, has little cause to be wise to this trickery, which perhaps explains the twenty million or so viewers who tune in to the Golden Globes during a typical year—numbers that come close to rivalling those of the Oscars.
Confession: I’ve never watched the Golden Globes, because its voters are neither participants in the film business nor critics—in other words, nobody whose professional qualifications render their judgment of movies any more significant to the industry or the art than a congress of dentists. I’ve heard that the pleasure of the event arises from the fact that the nominees know that the awards don’t matter—that the ceremony lacks the solemnity and the self-importance, let alone the actual importance, of the Oscars, and so the guests relax, some of them drink, and they lend the show a shambling charm that distinguishes it from Hollywood’s own self-celebration. Still, it has long surprised me that earnest industry journalists cover the Golden Globes with anything less than derision.
In any case, viewership was drastically down this year, both for the Golden Globes (a sixty-two per cent decline, to about seven million) and the Oscars (a drop of fifty-six per cent, to just over ten million). Some of this can be explained by the pandemic, which caused many of 2020’s biggest scheduled movies to be held out of circulation until later this year or even 2022. Oscar talk for next year has already started around one of the holdovers, “In the Heights,” which is opening on June 11th and is the sort of film that Hollywood and television executives alike hope will revive the popularity of movie-awards ceremonies. That’s why there’s also already been speculation in the press about which ceremony can be tapped to fill the Golden Globes’ broadcast slot next year in the run-up to the Oscars.
My unsolicited suggestion: don’t bother replacing it at all. My guess is that the decline of awards ceremonies will continue long after the pandemic has passed, because theatrical viewing itself is in irreversible decline, owing to the rise of streaming. Some movies will be box-office hits again, and some small segment of those hits will also be awards favorites, but the divide between highly managed franchise movies and director-driven Oscar darlings will only continue to grow as more movies in the latter category (following ones such as “The Irishman,” “Marriage Story,” and “Da 5 Bloods”) are produced and released by streaming services. By far the best film to win Best Picture in recent years was “Moonlight”; its total U.S. box-office take was twenty-seven million dollars, a negligible sum for any superhero or Pixar movie.
In recent years, the Academy has been addressing its own grievous lack of diversity—and the skewed awards that result—through a long-overdue expansion of its membership. At the same time, it has been struggling to maintain the popularity of the Oscars broadcast. One signal effort has been to speed up the ceremony (since 2002, the show has run under four hours). This year, the usual elbow-to-elbow seating at the Dolby Theatre was replaced, for social-distancing purposes, with a ballroom-like setting in Los Angeles’s Union Station. The ceremony featured less filler between the actual dispensing of awards—for instance, no live performances of nominated songs—yet it still ran about three and a quarter hours. (If the Academy really wants to reduce the running time, it should do away with commercial breaks.) But the broadcast’s bagginess is hardly the only factor contributing to its declining relevance. The very excitement of the Oscars these days is dampened by the media’s round-the-clock, year-long cycle of publicity and movie-awards infotainment. When the stars are already shining day and night, the Oscars become an anticlimax, and it takes a major effort of audacity or a major gaffe to make the show stand out.
Rather than desperately striving to increase viewership by gussying up the ceremony (or by tweaking the nominations in favor of more popular movies, as it tried to do a few years ago), the Academy should lean into the broadcast’s declining popularity. What might save the event is having fewer but more devoted viewers—ones who care about the kinds of movies that the Academy, at its best, sees fit to celebrate. Currently, the Oscars take place on enemy territory: television. The better setting for them is the very place where the Academy wants people to see movies: in theatres. The awards should be a movie-house event, not available online and not broadcast on TV. The commercials problem would vanish: the show will be an hour shorter. This year’s ceremony, co-produced by Steven Soderbergh with the bold and admirable intention of making the broadcast, as he explained, “feel like you’re watching a movie,” was a good start; if the ceremony had been shown in theatres like a movie, it could have been eligible for next year’s Oscars.
