The toughest categories, especially the three-way best female actor clash between Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman and Pamela Anderson, were over in film. Even there, all three of them eventually lost to Fernanda Torres (I’m Still Here) in a shock upset that will doubtless be felt all the way to the Oscars.
Glaser too was an odd choice for host: a stand-up comedian with a relatively low international profile, fronting the one awards night in awards season sold largely off the back of its internationality. For Australian viewers, in a telecast where Emilia Pérez director Jacques Audiard made his acceptance speeches in French, Glaser seemed unexpectedly and, at times, acutely American.
She also played it too safe with punchlines like P. Diddy, plastic surgery, Ozempic and “holding space” with Wicked: these are the dead fish of Hollywood’s humour barrel. Any comparison to Ricky Gervais, who hosted in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2016, and 2020, and offered zingers like “Get drunk, take your drugs, f— off”, leaves Glaser looking like a hired hand at a corporate sponsor night.
Nicole Kidman was nominated for Babygirl.Credit: AP
As for the Globes themselves, the telecast was a lavish acknowledgement that the turbulence of the past few years is firmly in the rearview mirror. In 2021 Tom Cruise handed back his three Golden Globes amid an industry boycott, and the awards were bought and repackaged by Penske Media after being shelved in 2022.
Flash forward to 2025 and the compliments were coming thick and fast after Zoe Saldaña opened the show with a speech that sounded more like a humanitarian address to Golden Globés Sans Frontières. Unsurprisingly for Hollywood, the difference between a long, unironic leap and an extraordinary stretch is sometimes no distance at all. (No word on whether Tom has asked for his statues back.)
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From a technical standpoint, too, there were self-evident tweaks intended to sharpen up an ageing genre (“awards nights”) for a younger-skewing audience. With presenters coming on stage accompanied by “info nuggets” in the style of the VH1 TV series Pop-Up Video, and then facing the television cameras with their backs to the audience, this was less Globes and more Glik Glok.
Proof too, perhaps, that these kinds of telecasts aren’t really about the people sitting the room – no matter how much the army of personal publicists believes they are – and are, in fact, all about the TV audience watching on channels which have shelled out large sums of money for the rights.
Who was it who said, “No one cares about movies any more; no one goes to cinema, no one really watches network TV”? Oh, that’s right. It was Ricky Gervais. At the Golden Globes.
