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.
After the debacle of Jo Koy’s appalling, worst-ever hosting of this year’s Golden Globes ceremony, the organizers of the Academy Awards are probably patting themselves on the back in the knowledge that they’ve successfully hired safe-pair-of-hands Jimmy Kimmel for this year’s ceremony. Yes, alas, because his joke-nemesis Matt Damon features in this year’s dead-cert winner Oppenheimer, there will be the public continuation of the smuggest and least amusing fake feud in contemporary life, but at least Kimmel won’t offend anyone, knows how to deliver a carefully scripted punchline and can be relied upon to keep things moving at a lick.
The 2023 Golden Globes awards took place this past weekend, and although I never really watch these things live, I am a woman and thus biologically and socially wired to inhale red carpet photos and the celebrity gossip that inevitably springs out of award show season. This year’s Golden Globes were shockingly free of politics, and so the focus was really on the movies and the celebrities — as it should be. That brings us to Taylor Swift, the twelve-time Grammy Award-winning country singer turned pop star. Although it seemed none of the celebs were too keen on Golden Globes host Jo Koy’s comedy routine, Swift’s reaction to a light-hearted jab made in her direction left many viewers with a bitter taste in their mouths.
The Golden Globes have historically been the strangest of all the major film awards ceremonies. Previously handed out by a mysterious body known as the HFPA (Hollywood Foreign Press Association), the ceremony has all the glamor and glitz of the Oscars, but with one big difference: there is free-flowing alcohol on all the tables, meaning that, more often than not, audiences can enjoy the spectacle of at least one A-list star collecting their award blind drunk, which leads to some of the more unorthodox and entertaining speeches in recent memory. And this unrestrained ethos extends itself to the hosts, too.
