What's with the Golden Globes?

a quick guide to the GG's role in awards season

I am an Oscar fanatic. My whole year is shaped around that awards show. I follow the predictions and odds all year long. You may wonder, however, what exactly makes the Golden Globes worthwhile. Are they good predictors of Oscar victory? Who gives them out? Are they really worth anything at all?

The Golden Globes, which took place on Sunday night, are part pointless posturing and part legitimate factor in the awards race. It’s important to understand their role because, although they got pretty close a few years ago, they aren’t going anywhere.

The most important thing to bear in mind is that the Globes’ voting body has zero overlap with the Academy (which bestows the Oscars). The former are decided by the approximately 300 voters of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, while the latter are voted on by over 10,000 working professionals in the film industry. (And if 300 sounds small, recall that there were only about 87 HFPA voters until the diversity scandal a few years ago.) So, 300 international journalists vs. 10,000 filmmakers.

That said, the Globes try their best to predict the winners of the Academy Awards and thereby be seen as an important and persuasive event. The reality of that status is up for debate, but the HFPA has one major trick up its sleeve: the Golden Globes are awarded the day before Oscar nomination voting opens. Academy members have this week to vote in their respective branches for their desired nominees. It can’t hurt your cause if they just watched you win an otherwise meaningless award the night before.

Winning a Globe, then, is all about rustling up buzz. Academy members—especially those who are only mildly interested in the Oscars—may have started Sunday with the assumption that Amy Madigan (Weapons) would win Best Supporting Actress honors at the Globes because of her weird-but-well-timed groundswell in the odds. By the time their Oscar ballots arrived on Monday, they would know that Madigan did not win. Instead, One Battle After Another’s Teyana Taylor—who was the odds frontrunner for months before Madigan’s sudden popularity boost—was given the Globe. Maybe they had it all wrong in their heads. Better put Taylor down on their ballot. (Many Academy voters don’t choose based on their own opinions but in hopes of being “right” by voting for the eventual winner.)

Not only did Teyana Taylor prevail over Madigan on Sunday, but she delivered a great acceptance speech. Mark that, because it matters. Last year, Demi Moore found herself thrown to the top of the Oscars race after a particularly touching and eloquent speech upon winning the Globe. Everyone knows the Oscars are long, and if they can listen to stirring acceptance speeches instead of mumbly unpreparedness, they will vote for the person who gives good speeches. This year, that factor was on display later in the Globes broadcast as well, when Paul Thomas Anderson’s discomfort with public speaking and inability to look at the audience was contrasted with Chloé Zhao’s beautiful and heartfelt words of gratitude and encouragement.

But wait, how did two people win? That’s the Golden Globes’ other big strategy. They break most categories in two, with one award for Drama and one for Comedy or Musical. That means double the nominees and double the winners. It also means that very serious films find themselves submitted in the Comedy or Musical category, which is seen as presenting weaker competition. This category fraud has become so common, however, that this year’s Globes found all the big head-to-head matches in the Comedy or Musical categories, leaving Drama an easy win for Oscar hopefuls like Zhao’s Hamnet.

Doubling the categories doubles the HFPA’s chances of awarding the eventual Oscar winner. It also means that some races are not clarified at all by the Globes. For instance, Jessie Buckley won Best Actress—Drama while Rose Byrne won Best Actress—Comedy or Musical. (Byrne, sensing some category fraud, started her speech by saying, “I didn’t sing in this movie!”) As it happens, the Best Actress Oscar race is already a two-hander pitting Buckley against Byrne. One of them will take the Academy Award (at this point, it could be either), but the Globes are the real winners because whichever prevails in March, they can advertise that they predicted the win with their award.

The Globe for Best Actor—Drama demonstrated another difference between the HFPA and the Academy: being the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, they are more likely to award non-English performances than the American-heavy Academy is. Thus, Wagner Moura won for his role in Brazil’s The Secret Agent. Then again, his biggest competition (One Battle After Another’s Leonardo DiCaprio and Marty Supreme’s Timothée Chalamet) were duking it out over in the Comedy category. (Sure, OBAA has some great moments of humor…but who would have called the film a comedy before the Globes?)

The final crucial difference between the Globes and Oscars is their format. The Globes are a literal party, where people sit around tables with their peers and eat and drink as much as they want. The Oscars round everyone up in an auditorium for an endless ceremony. While this doesn’t affect who wins the Golden Globes, it does mean that the winners are almost invariably giddy and drunk by the time they take the stage. And that can have a major effect (positive or negative) on those all-important acceptance speeches.