Every year, it happens like clockwork: The Golden Globes nominations are announced, and people get mad. Perhaps no year deserved that vitriol more than this one, which saw major snubs, primarily of TV shows and movies by and about black people (the Globes also classified Minari as a foreign film, when it is about people in America who speak Korean) [Edit: because I didn’t Google this I wrote Chinese first instead of Korean. I deeply regret this error]. The groundswell of rage about this was so large that one of the writers of Emily In Paris wrote this absolutely deranged essay about how Emily In Paris sucks and doesn’t deserve it (I will not link to this because I think it is smug and weird).
The Globes deserve this rage, but anyone who pays even a little attention to them can tell you they don’t deserve any of the attention or energy! NBC needs to stop airing the Golden Globes.
On Monday, the LA Times published a report about how corrupt the Hollywood Foreign Press, who votes for the Globes, is. None of the members are black. They will happily accept bribes, including from Emily In Paris (bribes that I assume were bankrolled by EiP star Emily Collins’ dad, Tarzan mastermind Phil Collins). And the bribes don’t even cost that much money, because there are only 70 weird Europeans that need to be convinced!
70! Let’s compare that to other major award shows. Slightly over 800 people vote for the Tonys. About 8,400 are allowed to vote for the Oscars. Around 12,000 people are eligible to vote for the Grammys (though the way Grammy noms and voting is done is horrible and corrupt in its own ways). There are a whopping 24,000 eligible voters for the Emmys.
The only thing shocking to me about the LA Times reporting on how much HFPA sucks is that it’s…not new information!!! The list of people who vote for the Globes is online! When I first began my life as a person who cared about award season, I would get worked up about Golden Globes nominations. Then I learned better! They are meaningless! There is a reason they are not included in Hollywood’s triple crown, the EGOT, and that’s because they don’t matter! They’re not even a good predictor of who will win the Oscar.
For the Globes, 70 Europeans vote on the celebs they most want to hang out with for a night, even if their movies sucked. In 2011, they nominated Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp for The Tourist, a movie that was a box office and critical flop. James Corden is nominated this year for The Prom, in a role that was called “homophobic” and “insulting.” We at Gold-Plated Girls always want to say that awards don’t matter, because mostly they don’t. But they also do matter because they can make major buzz for an actor or director or writer who then goes on to make more stuff, while other people, usually people with marginalized identities, struggle to get any money or eyeballs. But while that might be true of the EGOT awards, it really really is not true of the Globes! No one serious cares about these!
Really, the reason why anyone likes The Globes is because NBC puts it on TV and all the famous people get drunk. Which is great! Emma Thompson drinking on stage with her heels in her hands??? Absolutely legendary!
But the lesson should not be that we need to keep the Globes going because it’s the only time we watch famous people get drunk. We just need to add alcohol to more award shows.
The award show NBC should replace the Globes with is the Screen Actors Guild Awards. Here’s why.
The SAGs are voted on by all the full members of SAG, around 165,000 people. That is so many people! Obviously there are still some duds in the nominations, but overall it’s a pretty fun and interesting group (just no one vote for Amy Adams in Hillbilly Elegy, please).
The SAGs also have better categories! They give awards both to the whole cast and to the stunt ensembles. Both of these categories should be added to the Oscars (and the Tonys, while we’re at it).
Like the Globes, the SAGs also honor film AND TV, so you’re still getting the special mix of star power that makes the Globes seemingly unique. People lost their minds when Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston reunited at the Globes in 2020, but they also reunited at the 2020 SAGs.
Maybe the best reason to uplift SAG-AFTRA is that it’s a union, and unions rules. At their best, the SAGs are a tribute to the power and importance of organized labor, something we all need to remember.
“But Victoria,” you say. “People don’t care about the SAGs. They care about the Globes.” People only care about the Globes because they are on network TV, and NBC announces the nominees on the Today show. If Hoda did a story about the history of SAG-AFTRA and Noah Centineo and Lana Condor announced the nominees, everyone would care. The entertainment industry manufactures interest all the time. That’s how we ended up with Camila Cabello.