Regardless of what you made of the winners, 2024’s Golden Globes ceremony has gone down in infamy as one of the very worst in its history, entirely due to its terrible host Jo Koy. He was justly ridiculed for his incompetent, weirdly aggressive hosting style, and so the onus was on this year’s compère Nikki Glazer to bring basic professionalism back to the event as much as humor and slickness.
Well, nobody could accuse the Golden Globes Foundation — as they are now called — of predictability. Of the films that have been nominated for the ceremony on January 5, the frontrunner is Jacques Audiard’s much-discussed crime musical Emilia Pérez with ten nominations, including Best Film (Musical or Comedy), Best Director and Best Supporting Actress for its stars Selena Gomez and Zoe Saldana. The movie, which has met with enormous controversy in some circles because of its unfettered approach to social mores — not least having a trans woman, Karla Sofía Gascón, in the lead — is undeniably a bold and distinctive film that indicates that this is a year of risk-taking rather than complacency. But to what end?
It was to be the year of Shōgun. In one of the cleanest sweeps since Succession ended, the show won virtually everything at this year’s Emmys, including Best Drama Series, Lead Actress in a Drama for Anna Sawai and, unsurprisingly, Lead Actor in a Drama for the phenomenal Hiroyuki Sanada, who triumphed in a category that had some equally strong choices (Gary Oldman for Slow Horses), as well as some more perplexing ones (Idris Elba for Hijack and, bizarrely, Dominic West for The Crown). Shōgun took a record-breaking eighteen Emmys in total, with showrunner Justin Marks remarking of its makers Hulu and FX, “You guys greenlit a very expensive subtitled Japanese period piece whose central climax revolves around a poetry competition.” It proved to be a good bet.
It’s been an unusually good year on TV, and the Emmy nominations reflect a quality of both breadth and depth. The likes of Shogun, Slow Horses, Ripley and, of course, Baby Reindeer don’t come along very often, but for them all to be competing against one another is going to give Emmy voters quite the headache. Obviously it’s all but impossible to compare many of these shows; the genre-bending black comic horrors of Baby Reindeer simply aren’t more or less deserving than the elegant noirish depravity of Ripley, both of which are up for Best Limited Series, but the nature of awards is that one has to be accounted the winner, and Richard Gadd’s none-more-hyped show is likely to walk away with several awards, and deservedly so.
The much-anticipated new Benedict Cumberbatch series on Netflix, Eric, initially sounds as if it could have been made at any point in the past four decades. Bankable leading man whose character is battling substance abuse issues and mental instability; check. Diverse supporting cast including at least one character who is not only struggling against racial prejudice but homophobia too, check. Gritty-yet-faintly exotic setting, in this case the pre-Giuliani New York of the Eighties, check. But there is another element in Abi Morgan’s psychological thriller that throws a spanner in the works, in the form of the eponymous Eric.
It must be nice to be Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos. Not only is he paid a truly eye-watering amount of money to be in his job (roughly $50 million a year, according to reports), but because of his company’s pre-eminent position in the streaming market, he is interviewed, largely uncritically, by major news titles, even when he says things that are obviously either wrong or deeply stupid. Thus it has proved in a recent conversation with the New York Times, in which he announced, of last year’s hits Barbie and Oppenheimer, “Both of those movies would be great for Netflix. They definitely would have enjoyed just as big an audience on Netflix.” To add insult to injury, he declared that the size of a screen was all but irrelevant, saying, “My son’s an editor.
