Awards Season is Here!

Here We Go Again. The Golden Globes, clearly desperate to shake off their previous reputation of being a star-obsessed cabal, have nominated a slate of films that may be a decent predictor of who’s in contention for Academy Awards. If you really follow this stuff, that means their picks have become a little boring; if you’re a bit more of a casual, they’re now a handy awards season primer. Following what felt like a triumphant return to mainstream attention for movies in 2023, anchored by the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, this year feels a bit more like the post-COVID years in terms of the crossover between box office and awards attention. There are a few high-grossers who appeared in the Globes’ nominee slate who are set to make some noise at the Oscars, but the stratification of high-budget and low-budget films is once again a story of the year. The mid-budget films that would have traditionally produced solid box office going either directly to streaming (Hit Man, Juror #2) or produced O.K. results (Challengers, Conclave), but failed to have broad sticking power.

No matter your relationship to movies, and whether you care that much which wins an award, stuff like this gets movies seen and the “wrong” decisions are as important to a film’s reputation as the “right” ones, which is why I bother following this often-clownish horse race. The real tragedy of awards seasons aren’t the films that lose, it’s the ones that never gain enough attention to even compete. Regardless, it’s time for this year’s runners to take their mark.

Winners of the Night:

• Nikki Glaser, for walking the tightrope between classy host and roaster with grace and making jokes about the casts and content of the films instead of their runtimes. She shares this with CBS for putting on a very good show that managed to keep me away from a very low-scoring NFL game I would have watched on any other Sunday.

• Emilia Perez, which won: Supporting Actress, Non-English Language Picture, Best Original Song, and even Best Picture – Comedy/Musical. Zoe Saldana feels like the Best Supporting Actress frontrunner even if this film suffers some kind of backlash at the Oscars.

• Demi Moore, for vaulting into frontrunner status for Best Actress and will probably compel me to watch a 2.5-hour extremely gross body horror movie. Thanks, Demi.

• Everyone who won something for Shogun, a very good TV miniseries that warrants a shoutout on my movie blog.

• My dog, Oscar (yes, partially named for the awards), for surviving the biggest snowstorm Richmond has seen in quite a few years. Us too, I guess, but the little guy has some disadvantages.

• Sebastian Stan, for possibly punching a ticket to the Oscars. I really should check out A Different Man.

• Kieran Culkin, for I think wrapping up the Best Supporting Actor race by doing kinda what he just won awards for in Succession, but I enjoyed A Real Pain, so I’ll abide.

• The Brutalist for taking home some heavy-hitter awards: Best Director, Best Actor – Drama, Best Picture – Drama.

• Conclave for winning in Screenplay, which was an awfully competitive category and places itself as the frontrunner in Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars.

• Challengers for winning Best Original Score! Come on!!!

• Fernanda Torres made quite a statement on the Best Actress race by winning in a field that included Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, and Kate Winslet.

Losers of the Night:

• The Minnesota Vikings, who lost that game running concurrently that I’m again happy to have skipped and got absolutely waxed doing so.

• Anora, one of the year’s most critically acclaimed films, came up empty-handed. I think it’s been too acclaimed internationally and by Critics’ groups to fully count it out, but it’s no longer a frontrunner.

• Wicked, for only winning the supremely dumb Cinematic and Box Office Achievement award, the existence of which still confounds me.

• The City of Richmond, VA which doesn’t handle snow very well – Oscar wins for having persevered, but I feel like the rest of us lost, especially now that we have to boil our water

• Dune Part Two, which probably came out too early in the year and also wasn’t nominated for the silly Cinematic and Box Office achievement despite being a genuine cinematic achievement that also crushed at the box office. Unfortunately, the Lisan-al Ghaib himself came up empty handed as well.

• People like me who don’t like to mix our TV Awards and our Movie Awards, but I’ll again say that Shogun rules.

• Everyone running in Supporting Actor against Kieran Culkin.

I-Don’t-Knows of the Night:

• Lead Actor races feel competitive; I was hoping Mikey Madison would win for Anora, but with the number of Critics’ Awards she’s been winning, her door is still open despite Demi making quite the case for herself. In Actor, Adrien Brody won but we’re just getting started – the fact that he’s already won an Oscar could be working against him.

• I don’t know how far the Philadelphia Eagles will take this thing, but I’m along for the ride.

• I don’t know if Nikki Glaser will be back to host, but I hope so.

• I don’t know which of the films nominated in just a couple of categories like Nickel Boys will have a chance to break into more categories at the Oscars, but I’m sure some of them will. Similarly, I’d imagine the stuff like Conclave or A Real Pain, which each only won one Globe, could also continue showing up in a big way.

• I really don’t know how much this ceremony will predict or impact the Oscar race; I feel like Demi Moore, Sebastian Stan, and Fernanda Torres got themselves INTO their races, but I don’t know which films or performers might have fallen out of the race.  I also don’t know if the two winners of the two Motion Picture categories are to be viewed as the two favorites, but I think we should certainly take them seriously.