Golden Globes Film Noms Analysis: The Awards Group Is Said to Be Improved; Its Nominees Certainly Are

The first Golden Globe Award nominations issued by the new Golden Globes organization — an overhaul of the late Hollywood Foreign Press Association, with a lot of new members, new rules and a new broadcasting partner in CBS — were issued early Monday morning, and you know what? They’re pretty unobjectionable.

Yes, the categories are larger than they used to be, expanding from five to six slots, which certainly helps to make more stakeholders happy on a morning like this — but also increases the possibility of more bizarre nominees of the sort the HFPA was famous for, like Burlesque, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen and The Tourist. And yet, with only a couple of exceptions — a best musical/comedy actress nom for Jennifer Lawrence’s turn in the summer rom-com No Hard Feelings and a best original song nom for a Bruce Springsteen song from a film that I didn’t even remember existed, She Came to Me — there was nothing totally out of the blue. Indeed, when the most unexpected nominee is the largely unknown actress Alma Pöysti for the Finnish film Fallen Leaves in the best musical/comedy actress category, you can be fairly confident that it really is a new day at the Globes.

My sense is that by becoming a much larger and more international voting body than it used to be — there were roughly 100 voters last year, all based in the L.A. area, and there were 302 this year, the majority not — the Globes has become higher-brow and more of a barometer of the Oscars than it used to be. (Disclosure: Golden Globes producer Dick Clark Productions is owned by Penske Media Eldridge, a joint venture between Penske Media Corporation and Eldridge that also owns The Hollywood Reporter.)

While the organization is throwing a bone to CBS and Joe and Jane Public with two new categories that could boost ratings, cinematic/box office achievement (clear your mantelpiece, Barbie) and best performance in stand-up comedy on TV (how poetic will it be if the Globes’ old friend Ricky Gervais, nominated for his special Armageddon, wins its first edition), fully one-half of its best drama picture nominees are titles that are also nominated for best film not in the English language (Anatomy of a Fall, Past Lives and The Zone of Interest), which is unprecedented and hardly pandering.

As I believe will also be the case when the Academy announces its noms on Jan. 23, the main headline, a half-year later, is still “Barbenheimer”: Barbie scored a field-leading nine Globe noms and Oppenheimer placed second with eight. Killers of the Flower Moon and Poor Things tied for third with seven each. Meanwhile, among companies, Netflix led the field with 13 noms (it really got recognition for everything that it could have hoped for except its animated features), while Warners placed second with 12 and A24 and Universal tied for third with 11 each.

The best drama picture nominees include, as mentioned, Anatomy of a Fall, Past Lives and The Zone of Interest, plus Killers of the Flower Moon, Maestro and Oppenheimer. That’s totally respectable, but surely a bummer for Saltburn (which I think would have had a better shot as a musical/comedy), Ferrari, All of Us Strangers, Origin and Priscilla.

The best musical/comedy picture nominees, meanwhile, are Air, American Fiction, Barbie, The Holdovers, May December and Poor Things. I’m not sure that Air is a comedy, and the backers of The Color Purple undoubtedly wish it hadn’t been accepted as one, given that it probably took a slot from them, which is a pretty rough miss for that film, the one out-and-out musical in the race, especially on the heels of it missing AFI’s top 10 list.

If you want to know the frontrunners for the Globes’ best picture categories, then, as always, look no further than the director and screenplay categories, which consider in just one category each work from across all genres. The dramas Killers, Oppenheimer and Past Lives and the musical/comedies Barbie and Poor Things got noms for both director and screenplay, so, unsurprisingly, those are your picture frontrunners. The hanging-chad noms: Maestro for director and Anatomy of a Fall for screenplay. (The misses of Zone on the directing side and American Fiction on the writing side must have stung.)

The drama actor race is half Irish, with Saltburn’s Barry Keoghan, Oppenheimer’s Cillian Murphy and All of Us Strangers’ Andrew Scott landing alongside Maestro’s Bradley Cooper, Killers’ Leonardo DiCaprio and Rustin’s Colman Domingo. (Cooper could become the first person ever to win Globes for directing and acting for the same film.) Tough misses for Zone’s Christian Friedel and Ferrari’s Adam Driver, who probably stood as strong a shot with this awards body as any.

Over in musical/comedy actor, frontrunners Paul Giamatti (The Holdovers) and Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction) are joined by Air’s Matt Damon, Wonka’s Timothée Chalamet and two big-name stars of under-seen A24 indies, Dream Scenario’s Nicolas Cage and Beau Is Afraid’s Joaquin Phoenix, the latter of whom was not long ago expected to have a better chance in the other lead actor category for Napoleon, which in the end was entirely shut out. A miss in this category marks the end of the line for The Burial’s Jamie Foxx.

Predictably, the drama actress field includes Nyad’s Annette Bening, Killers’ Lily Gladstone, Anatomy’s Sandra Hüller and Maestro’s Carey Mulligan. It is filled out by two promising young actresses, Past Lives’ Greta Lee and Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeny, who weren’t slam-dunks, but are in mold of the up-and-comers that the Globes have always championed early in their careers and ever after. Chosen over the likes of Golda’s Helen Mirren and Origin’s Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, these are career-changing noms for them.

The musical/comedy actress category, as noted, includes a few surprises — Pöysti and Lawrence, whose slots The Little Mermaid’s Halle Bailey and Flora and Son’s Eve Hewson would have loved — as well as favorites Emma Stone (Poor Things), Margot Robbie (Barbie), Natalie Portman (May December) and Fantasia Barrino (The Color Purple).

Drawing from all genres, the supporting actor field includes the universally predicted Robert Downey Jr. (Oppenheimer), Ryan Gosling (Barbie) and Robert De Niro (Killers), plus two actors from Poor Things — Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe — and May December’s Charles Melton, who has outperformed expectations thus far in the season. Killers’ Jesse Plemons, American Fiction’s Sterling K. Brown, All of Us Strangers’ Paul Mescal and Air’s Chris Messina could have used a shot of momentum with a nom here.

Supporting actress is, in a way, the most all-over-the-place and hard-to-predict category. Nominees include breakouts Danielle Brooks (The Color Purple) and Da’Vine Joy Randolph (The Holdovers), A-listers Emily Blunt (Oppenheimer), Jodie Foster (Nyad) and Julianne Moore (May December) and one true standout from Saltburn who has always done well at the Globes, three-time Globe nominee/one-time Globe winner Rosamund Pike. Not many would have predicted that this field of six would not have included Penélope Cruz (Ferrari), and you can be sure that Taraji P. Henson (The Color Purple), America Ferrera (Barbie) and the American Fiction ensemble surrounding Jeffrey Wright (including Erika Alexander and Issa Rae) had high hopes for a nom here, as well.

The non-English-language film race will almost certainly come down to the three nominees that are also up for best picture, Anatomy, Past Lives and Zone, which are joined in the category by Finland’s Fallen Leaves, Spain’s Society of the Snow and Italy’s Io Capitano. The most stinging misses are probably those experienced by The Taste of Things (the film France submitted as its representative for the best international feature Oscar competition over Anatomy), as well as the Oscar entries from Germany, The Teacher’s Lounge, and Tunisia, Four Daughters.

Animated feature nominees broke heavily in favor of the commercial, with noms for this weekend’s box office leader The Boy and the Heron, from GKIDS; Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse from Sony; Elemental and Wish from Disney; and The Super Mario Bros. Movie from Universal. The final slot went to Suzume, from Toho, rather than Netflix’s well-reviewed Nimona, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget or Leo, which I find a bit surprising.

And then there are the two music categories.

Barbie is the story for original song, claiming three of the six nominations: “Dance the Night” (co-written and performed by Dua Lipa), “I’m Just Ken” (co-written by Mark Ronson and performed by Gosling) and “What Was I Made For?” (written by Billie Eilish and Finneas and performed by Eilish), all excellent. (Only two Barbie tunes can be nominated for the corresponding Oscar due to a cap.) The other three nominees are Springsteen’s “Addicted to Romance” from She Came to Me, “Peaches” from The Super Mario Bros. Movie and the Lenny Kravitz tune “Road to Freedom” from Rustin.

Original score, meanwhile, includes, as expected, Killers (the late Robbie Robertson), Oppenheimer (Ludwig Göransson), Poor Things (Jerskin Fendrix) and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Daniel Pemberton). The other two nominees: The Zone of Interest (Mica Levi) and The Boy and the Heron (Joe Hisaishi), picked over formidable competition including Barbie (Ronson and Andrew Wyatt), Elemental (Thomas Newman) and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (John Williams).

Finally, there’s the cinematic/box office achievement category, which is a little silly — but, if it lures into the Beverly Hilton’s International Ballroom Taylor Swift (on behalf of nominee Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour) and/or Tom Cruise (on behalf of Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part One), will have to be regarded as an unmitigated success.

We’ll see how this all goes down soon enough, when the Globes air on CBS less than one month from today, on Jan. 7, 2024.