The 2024 Golden Globes Nominations: Golden Globes-ier Than Ever
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Normally, all eyes are on the Golden Globes because the award show is a major precursor to Oscar season, but this year the stakes are particularly high; the January 7, 2024 Globes telecast will be the first ceremony since the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, mired in scandals related to its lack of voter diversity and the sexual misconduct allegations against former president Philip Berk, shut down and sold its assets to a new ownership group.
The 2024 nominations are a mix of the predictable (armfuls of nods for Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Succession), and filled with some characteristically inscrutable Golden Globes choices (why in the world is Past Lives nominated as a “Non-English Language” film?). With the nominees officially out, we’ve broken down six of the most notable storylines heading into Hollywood’s medium-est night.
Past Lives was nominated as a foreign film.
Celine Song’s directorial debut Past Lives is one of the year’s best movies, a tender exploration of love across cultures anchored by a mammoth Greta Lee performance. It’s also a film primarily written in English and set in the United States, so the Globes’ decision to nominate it for “Best Picture, Non-English Language” is a little baffling. Song’s movie also received nods in “Best Motion Picture, Drama,” and a host of other major categories, so it’s not as if sneaking it into the non-English group was the only way for it to receive some well-deserved recognition. While the Korean dialogue in the movie between Lee’s character and Teo Yoo’s is obviously hugely important to the plot, that’s in large part because it contrasts with the English-language scenes, capturing the push-and-pull between Lee’s character’s South Korean upbringing and her life in New York with her husband. Add to that the fact that Past Lives is an A24 production, and the whole thing just seems like one of those inscrutable Golden Globe choices that makes less sense the more you think about it.
The Succession family battle continues in the TV acting categories.
HBO’s Succession is all about family members trying to get a leg up on one another, and that competition will continue as the show and its cast make their final awards run, with three nods apiece in “Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series, Drama” (Jeremy Strong, Kieran Culkin, and, curiously, Brian Cox) and “Best Supporting Actor, Television” (Matthew Macfadyen, Alan Ruck, and Alexander Skarsgård), as well as noms for Sarah Snook and J. Smith-Cameron. The decision to count Cox as a lead in Succession is odd, given that Logan Roy dies in just the third episode of the season. His presence continues to loom large, and Cox’s work as the fiery media titan and patriarch is some of the best of his storied career, but this seems like a no-brainer case to put him in the supporting category. Cox, Strong and Snook have all taken home Golden Globes already for their work on the show, and while certainly not undeserving, it’d be thrilling if Culkin, Macfadyen, and Smith-Cameron earned hardware, as all three turn in their strongest performances in the show’s whole run during Season 4.
The diversity of the nominees is improving, but still not where it needs to be.
Given that diversity among the voting body was a huge scandal that led in part to the disbanding of the Hollywood Foreign Press, it’s worth digging deeper into the makeup of this year’s nominees. In many ways, the 2024 class is an improvement, with recognition for Cord Jefferson’s literary-world comedy American Fiction (“Best Picture, Musical or Comedy,” “Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy”), though it could have easily earned nods for its razor-sharp script, supporting turn from Tracee Ellis Ross, and even Jefferson’s direction. Fantasia Barrino and Danielle Brooks both received nods for The Color Purple, though it’s a bit of a shock that the film itself didn’t snag “Best Picture, Musical or Comedy” (to be fair, this is a particularly strong year for that category). On the TV side, Ayo Edebiri and Quinta Brunson both earned well-deserved recognition for their work in The Bear and Abbott Elementary, respectively, and Korean writer-director Lee Sung Jin’s white-knuckle Netflix show Beef received several huge nominations in the TV categories. Nonbinary performers like composer Mica Levi and actor Bella Ramsey earned nominations, as did gay actors Colman Domingo and Matt Bomer.
There are a handful of glaring snubs, though, including Teyana Taylor for her heartbreaking work in A Thousand and One, and Juel Taylor’s rollicking sci-fi opus They Cloned Tyrone. While unlikely given the film’s minimal box office success, Jordan Firstman absolutely warrants award recognition for his work in Rotting in the Sun and Vuk Lungulov-Klotz’s Mutt was one of the year’s most moving and assured debuts.
The creeping incursion of non-studio studios continues.
At this point, there’s not really any novelty in streaming movies making award shortlists, and after Apple TV+’s CODA took home Best Picture at the 2022 Academy Awards, these non-traditional movies have fully infiltrated the most traditional of Hollywood accolades. This year, the Golden Globes heavily nominated Killers of the Flower Moon (an Apple Original Film), as well as Netflix’s Maestro and May December and Amazon Studios’ Air. Both the Globes and the Oscars have updated their theatrical release requirements in recent years, though the former has been more accommodating than the latter, which will introduce additional criteria streaming movies must meet to be considered for Best Picture starting in 2025. Even Scorsese, a longtime supporter of the theatrical experience, has worked with Netflix and Apple on his last two projects; it won’t be surprising to see a Golden Globe nominee list made up entirely of non-legacy studios within the next half-decade.
Barbie has bested Oppenheimer at the box office and on the awards circuit so far.
Chalk up another point in the Barbenheimer battle to Greta Gerwig’s technicolor feminist comedy, which not only owns the top spot at the domestic box office by more than $50 million over the no. 2 entry (Oppenheimer sits at no. 5 as of press time), but also bested Christopher Nolan’s period piece in the first major round of award recognition. Barbie received an impressive nine nods at the Globes, which Variety noted made it “the second most-nominated in the 81-year history of the show. (Robert Altman’s musical comedy Nashville holds the record with a staggering 11 nominations.) Barbie earned well-deserved recognition in both the “Musical or Comedy” categories, as well as Gerwig for “Best Director” and “Best Screenplay, Motion Picture,” and a trio of “Best Original Song, Motion Picture” nods. If only Christopher Nolan had worked with Travis Scott on a theme song for Oppenheimer instead of Tenet.
The inaugural “Cinematic & Box Office Achievement” category did exactly what it was supposed to.
A pretty transparent attempt to juice ratings by including mainstream hits, the Golden Globes’ new category requires a movie to have made over $150 million worldwide, with $100 million domestic, and seeks to acknowledge the films that are typically only celebrated in the form of making a bunch of people very, very rich. But honestly, given the intent of the category, which Helen Hoehne of the Globes said is meant to “recognize the hard work and innovation that goes into making a film that is both a blockbuster and artistically exceptional,” they kinda nailed it. They got to tip their hats to the likely conclusions of two beloved franchises in John Wick and Guardians of the Galaxy, incorporate surefire ratings booster Taylor Swift, and praise a handful of movies that managed to be both critical and commercial successes (Barbie, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse). This seems like a category that could struggle some years, but in its inaugural proof-of-concept form, the Globes pressed all the right buttons.
Originally Appeared on GQ
