Wicked

Well, One Battle After Another is the toast of the Golden Globe nominations and Wicked: For Good is… not. That’s the biggest immediate takeaway of the first indicator as to how the awards race next year is likely to pan out. The many nuances and surprises of Monday's announcement are not only a fascinating insight into the state of Hollywood in 2025, but also a reminder that the Globes have always prized big star names above everything else – including, perhaps, the worthiness of their inclusion.

This year’s Oscar nominations were always going to be more low-key than usual, overshadowed as they inevitably have been both by the fires in Los Angeles — which has led to repeated delays in their announcement — and by Donald Trump’s inauguration, the after-effects of which are still rippling in Hollywood circles days later. It was therefore amusing to see that The Apprentice, the highly controversial biopic of the young Trump, has been Oscar-nominated for two of its actors, Sebastian Stan as Trump and the much-admired Jeremy Strong as his mentor Roy Cohn. Strong faces quite a challenge in the Best Supporting Actor from, among others, his Succession co-star Kieran Culkin, who is widely tipped to win for his performance in A Real Pain.

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.

2023 was a great year for movies. After several disappointing and low-grade years post-pandemic, there was a plethora of brilliant films, all of which have combined to make awards season perhaps the most intriguing there’s been in more than a decade — even if it’s a virtual given that Christopher Nolan and Oppenheimer will storm to victory. But any year that contains the likes of Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, Past Lives, The Zone of Interest and — oh yes — Barbie can only be taken seriously as one of the very best times for high-grade, intelligent film in memory. It was not a great year for blockbusters, however. The Marvel flops included The Marvels and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and the likes of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, The Flash and Shazam!