Oppenheimer Triggers Likely Oscars Landslide As Golden Globes Snub Barbie

So, awards season and the Golden Globes got off to a fresh start. The cleaned-up and respectable Globes put scandals about kickbacks and a lack of diversity in its voting body behind them, dumping the rackety “Hollywood Foreign Press Association” in favor of the “Golden Globes Foundation” and drawing a line under the strike era.

This year’s Globes were once again the most relaxed and cordial of the A-lister prizefests – the delayed Christmas office party of Hollywood awards nights, with nominees drinking wine and being seen doing so on camera and submitting to the mildest and weakest of roasts from host Jo Koy.

After accepting this thankless MC role, Koy had to accept that Kristen Wiig and Will Ferrell would outshine him in their incidental co-presenter roles, as well as by the memory of the notoriously outspoken former host Ricky Gervais, who demonstrated that he was still a player by winning best performance in standup comedy with Armageddon.

Oppenheimer Triggers Likely Oscars Landslide As Golden Globes Snub Barbie

But it was also an unusually intellectual evening and a terrific night for the -Oppenheimer half of the Barbenheimer phenomena – if not the Barb half.

Christopher Nolan’s enormous, ruminative epic about J Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of America’s nuclear weapon, and how he was tortured by his guilt and responsibility for causing mankind to take its decisive 20th-century stride toward self-annihilation won five awards.

It won Best Movie (drama), best Director for Nolan, Best Actor (drama) for Cillian Murphy for his gaunt performance as Oppenheimer, with his sightless glare of dread, support actor for Robert Downey Jr. as Oppenheimer’s government rival Lewis Strauss; and the best score for Ludwig Göransson.

Oppenheimer’s main competition in the serious American epic stakes, Martin Scorsese’s superb Killers of the Flower Moon, was thus, rightly or wrongly, overshadowed – though Lily Gladstone made history as the first Indigenous winner, winning best actress (drama) for her powerful performance as the Native American woman at the centre of a conspiracy to defraud and erase her people.

Oppenheimer Triggers Likely Oscars Landslide As Golden Globes Snub Barbie

Greta Gerwig’s wild and bizarre toy franchise comedy Barbie, starring Margot Robbie, failed to convert many of its nine nominations. It received two awards: Best Song and the strangely conceived new “cinematic and box office achievement prize,” which is intended to recognize financial successes that would otherwise go unnoticed and to reward a mix of merit and cash in proportions that are not fully clear.

Barbie was defeated in the categories of best movie (musical or comedy) and best actress (musical or comedy) by Yorgos Lanthimos’ brilliant absurdist nightmare Poor Things, which featured Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, a Victorian fallen woman brought back from the dead in a bizarre Frankensteinian experiment.

Alexander Payne’s wonderful comedy The Holdovers, set in the 1970s, was a more conventional winner. It won acting awards for Paul Giamatti, who plays a grumpy boarding school teacher who has to babysit troubled kids over the Christmas break, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who plays the school’s cook, whose son died in the Vietnam War, which the privileged white kids have managed to avoid.

Oppenheimer Triggers Likely Oscars Landslide As Golden Globes Snub Barbie

And what a night for Justine Triet’s fascinating courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall, which had already won the Cannes Palme d’Or, winning not only best non-English language film but also best screenplay, beating out more fancied runners such as Poor Things, Oppenheimer, and Celine Song’s relationship drama Past Lives.

This year’s Globes also highlighted another chapter in the illustrious career of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, whose late-flowering picture The Boy and the Heron won Best Animated Film.

Overall, Oppenheimer has been a tremendous success. The Globes rarely predict what occurs on Oscar night, but this is the first rumble of an Oscar landslide.

SOURCE – (Guardian)