So, One Battle After Another is going to sweep the Oscars. That was fairly certain before last night’s Golden Globe awards, but it is now essentially guaranteed. Paul Thomas Anderson’s loose Thomas Pynchon adaptation won best film in the musical/comedy category, as well as Best Director, Best Screenplay – over the hotly tipped Sinners, which had been expected to win the award as a consolation prize – and Best Supporting Actress for the scene-stealing Teyana Taylor as the superbly named Perfidia Beverly Hills.
Those of us who would have liked to see Amy Madigan take that award for her indelibly creepy performance in Weapons will have been disappointed, but in truth the Globes threw up a modest number of surprises. Timothée Chalamet – who took the Best Actor award for the musical/comedy category – cemented his position as the Oscars front-runner for his no-holds-barred performance in Marty Supreme, which has become an unexpected box-office hit in large part due to its charismatic star, and Hamnet’s victory for Best Drama film, over Frankenstein, brought Chloé Zhao’s Maggie O’Farrell adaptation back into the competition after it was felt to be slipping.
It seems increasingly likely that that film’s Jessie Buckley, who won Best Actress in a Drama, is the one to beat, and the surprise victory for Wagner Moura in the Brazilian film The Secret Agent in the Best Actor in a Drama category puts him into contention, too. It was also interesting that Sinners, which has been thought to be the only serious threat to One Battle After Another at the Oscars, was largely shut out, only winning awards for Best Score – a gong handed out during a commercial break, ignominiously – and the nonsensical consolation prize of “Cinematic and Box Office Achievement.” Still, a lot can and will change between now and March 15, when the Academy Awards are handed out, and the frantic round of gladhanding and rubber chicken-ing will only intensify.
The television awards were predictable – another Best Drama award for The Pitt, the third award for Hacks’s Jean Smart in a row, more love for Seth Rogen and The Studio and four awards for the Netflix cause de célèbre Adolescence, which is clearly this year’s Baby Reindeer. I was pleased to see Rhea Seehorn deservedly win Best Actress for her powerhouse performance in Pluribus, and the Best Stand-up Comedy Performance award for Ricky Gervais for his Mortality show brought back fond memories of Gervais’s provocative and deeply offensive stints hosting the show.
Such outrage was largely absent from Nikki Glaser’s assured MC, which allowed for the usual easy jokes about Leonardo DiCaprio’s penchant for dating much younger women – “Countless iconic performances, you’ve worked with every great director, you’ve won three Golden Globes and an Oscar, and the most impressive thing is you were able to accomplish all that before your girlfriend turned 30” – and a gag about Sean Penn’s appearance in Battle, where he was likened, not inaccurately, to “a sexy leather handbag.” The politics ended up being left to Judd Apatow, who won applause from the usual quarters for saying, “I believe we’re a dictatorship now”, and mocking the Globes’ strange categorization of films, which allowed The Martian to beat Apatow’s film Trainwreck a decade ago.
Still, minus Gervais and the element of genuine surprise or danger, this was a steady-as-they-go Globes, which cemented frontrunners, allowed a few underappreciated pictures to have their moment, and, best of all, sidelined Wicked: For Good completely. For that small mercy, at least, we should all be grateful.
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