The 83rd Golden Globes let down talented nominated artists with paeans to toxicity

An It Was Just An Accident image demonstrating what everyone had to do after viewing the 83rd Golden Globes catastrophe

Well, at least Ricky Gervais didn't show up in-person.

Like a browbeaten  Franz Kafka protagonist returning to work at a dead-end job even after turning into a cockroach, I shuffled into my couch last night to once more watch the Golden Globes. Each year I swear I'm done. This will be the year I skip this award ceremony, I'm always complaining about. Yet, like terrible clockwork, my eyeballs remain glued to this glitzy debacle. I'm predictable. I'm resistant to change. As AJR once sang, "I'm weak." But hey, at least I wasn't the person in charge of the music at the 83rd Golden Globes.

If any element encapsulated what a boondoggle this enterprise was, it was the barrage of random modern pop tunes scattered throughout the ceremony. Only occasionally (like Timothee Chalamet's Marty Supreme win being accompanied by "Everybody Wants to Rule the World") did the tunes remotely make sense win for what was happening on-screen. Mostly, it was a grab-bag of familiar yet incongruous pop songs just blaring over people walking to the stage or presenters coming to the stage. Were the producers worried that viewers would stop paying attention if they didn't have "stimulation" every second of the ceremony?

That concern would certainly explain the presence of the two announcers that kept weighing down the 83rd Golden Globes. Kevin Frazier and Marc Malkin were tasked with doing the "coming up...Best Animated Feature" segways into commercial or dialogue while winners strolled up to the stage. Frazier and Malkin's approach to this task was to emulate a pair of boisterous radio DJs who compel you to switch to another station the moment they start talking. Their banter was cringe-inducing, while their delivery of lines like "will [Chalamet] thank Kylie Jenner again? We are about...to...find...out!" was way too hammy, even in award season, a realm that gave us Ariana DeBose's "Angela Bassett did the thing" line.

Irritating is the only word for Frazier and Malkin's antics. I instinctively began to groan the moment they started talking. Worse, combining them with the overt needle drops as folks like Stellan Skarsgard walked to the podium imbued the proceedings with the wrong kind of excess. The days of Donald Sutherland at the Oscars dropping a behind-the-scenes tidbit about Shrek (which just won Best Animated Feature) while soaring orchestral music plays are apparently gone. Now it's all about overstimulation that woefully distracts from the movies themselves.

The art that the Golden Globes are supposed to be highlighting kept getting lost in the shuffle during the 83rd Golden Globes. This included the weird choice to not show clips from the various movies/TV shows when the acting category nominees were announced. Who wants to see why Chase Infiniti and Lee Byung-hun are getting universal raves when you can just cut to a wide shot of the entire ballroom with as little yellow dot indicating where these people are sitting? Rather than letting viewers appreciate tremendous artistic accomplishments, these wide images just conveyed cold distance. 

Then there were the disgraceful elements of the ceremony that dramatically undercut the most moving moments from the various acceptance speeches. Teyana Taylor concluded her richly deserved Best Supporting Actress win (for One Battle After Another) by declaring:

"To my brown sisters and little brown girls watching tonight, our softness is not a liability. Our depth is not too much. Our light does not need permission to shine. We belong in every room we walk into. Our voices matter, and our dreams deserve space."

What a magnificent speech. Shortly afterward, Frazier and Malkin kicked off the first of many Polymarket plugs during the ceremony. These showed viewers which of the nominees were the favorites to win per this crypto-driven prediction market's users. First of all, keep some element of showmanship and surprise in an awards show. Don't just blare "this is whose the favorite to win!" More importantly, crypto services have been shown to heavily affect Black and Brown communities, including how data centers fueling crypto and AI are being built on "environmental racism" targeting those marginalized populations. Teyana Taylor made a righteous plea for a Black and Brown women to remember their humanity. The 83rd Golden Globes kept highlighting a service and practice running counter to that humanity.

Then there was the fucking UFC promo, oh God. One of those announcers made the declaration that "these next two presenters are so in demand we had to get muscle  from the UFC to protect them." A pair of UFC fighters then came out in a clumsily arranged shot before they immediately left the stage. Chappell Roan's "Pink Pony Club" then played as the Heated Rivalry duo came out. The joke was already a weird one predicated on "UFC machismo and then SURPRISE! Gay stuff!" It was also eyeroll-worthy corporate synergy, as the parent company of CBS (the new broadcast home of the Golden Globes), Paramount Skydance, just announced a long-term deal to air UFC fights.

What made this especially disgusting, though, was that it happened right after The Secret Agent won Best International Feature. This movie about working-class people banding together in the face of totalitarianism and the horrors of living under fascism is a masterpiece. Yet director Kleber Mendonça Filho's acceptance speech was shamefully cut short, while this UFC plug got to play without any trims. 

Even more egregiously, the UFC is an organization (like Paramount Skydance) in deep cahoots with fascism, including the "grand wizard" (as Bob Ferguson would say) in the Oval Office. How sickening to provide a pat on the head to a movie so masterfully exploring the horrors of existing under fascism only to then devote screentime to a fascism-endorsing sport. The marginalized and working-class voices that The Secret Agent elevates and underscores are the same ones UFC head Dana White and other leaders in this organization constantly dehumanize. The whiplash here was staggering. Like the Oscars giving No Other Land the Best Documentary Feature Oscar while refusing to support one of its directors when he was attacked by IDF soldiers, this Golden Globes ceremony couldn't follow even 10% of the moral convictions of its nominated artists.

These disgusting developments combined with other baffling moments, like Snoop Dogg's befuddling Best Podcast category presentation (if that sentence doesn't describe a layer of Hell, I'll eat my hat) or Panic! at the Disco's "High Hopes" playing when KPop Demon Hunters won Best Animated Feature (why not play "Soda Pop," "Takedown," or "What It Sounds Like" from the actual movie?!?) made for an entirely bizarre ceremony. The outside world is burning down. ICE agents are killing human beings like Renee Good. Nobody reasonable would expect the ceremony that nominated The Tourist for Best Picture to have the good sense to "lead the revolution." A little more tact to not shill for crypto and UFC, though, is not too much to ask.

What's sad is, whenever the everyday artists making great movies got up on stage, the ceremony finally had a warmth and humanity that was irresistible. The KPop Demon Hunters Best Original Song speech was such a lovely ode to the struggling dreams. "Rejection is just redirection" is a great mantra that I'll be adding to my everyday lexicon. Paul Thomas Anderson giving a special thank you to Regina Hall in his One Battle After Another speech was deeply moving, ditto his tribute to the late assistant director Adam Somner. Also loved that Chloé Zhao gave Ryan Coogler a shout-out from the stage about their time together in Sundance Labs. Man, those two being in the same room decades ago, what I wouldn't have given to be there.

The 83rd Golden Globes, unfortunately, needed more of that rich humanity or even just memorable spectacle (like the Best Original Song performances at the Oscars) to make the three hours function nicely as satisfying "bread and circuses." Instead, it was a clumsy experience marked by janky audio cuts (I lost count of how many times a presenter saying "the nominees are..." got drowned out by orchestral music that was cued up too soon) and limp writing for the presenters. The lack of footage showcasing the nominated movies/performances/TV shows just made the whole thing feel less like an ode to a year of artistry and more like a chance for Paramount Skydance/Silicon Valley synergy. Why did I see Polymarket bullshit more often than Sinners footage?

The distracting presence of toxicity was exemplified by Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos lurching over the table belonging to Warner Bros. title One Battle After Another. This man, whose dedicated years to slaughtering movie theaters, now lurched over a collection of talent behind a film exemplifying the joys and craftsmanship going into theatrical cinema. I know Sarandos and the other Netflix brass have purchased Warner Bros., but they don't own it yet. I also know Sarandos is always at major award shows, including the Golden Globes. However, why was he seated here or allowed to sit there? It was so gross to constantly see him and be reminded that Warner Bros. will soon get swallowed up by the folks endorsing Tony Hinchcliffe.

In presenting the night's penultimate awards, Julia Roberts said this was a night for "artists". She did not say it was an event for Silicon Valley Baron Harkonnen to remind everyone of his monopolistic cultural ambitions. Unfortunately, folks like Sarandos were at the forefront of the 83rd Golden Globes. Many of the films nominated at this show, like Sinners, The Secret Agent, One Battle After Another, It Was Just An Accident, and No Other Choice, implored audiences to look around and challenge the wider world. The 83rd Golden Globes, meanwhile, asked viewers to shut up and hug their new daddy, Polymarket. 

Sidenote: Hey, it looks like Scott Gairdner, the co-host of my favorite podcast (Podcast: the Ride), directed the AMC Theatres podcast segment! No wonder Griffin Newman made a voice-over cameo in this bit, I got so excited when I heard his voice, I was just listening to his PtR Timekeeper episode in the gym yesterday.