Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Rich Polk/Golden Globes 2024 via Getty Images
The 2024 Golden Globes had highlights, sure. There was Lily Gladstone’s win for Killers of the Flower Moon, some excellent speeches from Ayo Edebiri and Kieran Culkin, and deserved appreciation for Anatomy of a Fall. A few of the presenter duos also figured out the right tone to take with the crowded, buzzy room. Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig brought pure goofs. America Ferrera and Kevin Costner went for “weird energy but somehow it works?” At several points, the ceremony seemed to achieve awards show status quo.
But it never fully escaped the pall created by host Jo Koy, who alternated between berating the crowd for not laughing at his jokes and blaming his writers for the material he felt didn’t land. His presence became less and less pronounced as the show went on, but even still, every Koy return was a reminder that the night’s whole energy was off. The Globes no longer had the free-for-all atmosphere they once did, in spite of an announcer who kept insisting the room was the best and most raucous party in town. Nothing says “we’re having fun” quite like a disembodied voice that interrupts before every commercial break to reiterate how much fun is happening on screen. And speaking of fun …
LOW: Every single thing that happened during Jo Koy’s opening monologue. It started innocently enough. Koy made some Meryl Streep-gets-nominated-a-lot jokes, which is default monologue material, and he did a little impression of his mother, a favorite topic from his own stand-up. But right around the Oppenheimer-is-long joke, things took a sharp nosedive. He described Barbie’s “big boobies,” which incited a wincing Greta Gerwig reaction shot. Clearly Koy could tell none of it was playing well in the room, and he began blaming other people: the writers, the crowd, the fact that he was booked for this gig relatively recently. “Some I wrote, some other people wrote,” he said about a joke that fell flat. “Yo, I got the gig ten days ago! What do you want, a perfect monologue? Shut up!” Koy then wandered through a Succession joke about billionaires needing to pull out (which he tried to save by repeating the punchline several times) and another about Harry and Meghan’s dud of a Netflix deal (“like I said, I didn’t write all of these”) before landing on a joke where he pretended to confuse Meryl Streep with Angela Bassett. It ended. Everyone clapped, likely because it ended.
LOW: Perhaps the most egregious bit from Koy’s intro: “We all dreamt of this moment.” Did we? Did the people in this room not dream of Emmys and Oscars and Grammys and Tonys? The acronym is EGOT, not EGGGOT! Golden Globes, you are overextending your station.
WHOA: Taylor Swift not playing along with Koy’s shoutout. This woman very rarely turns down an opportunity to get on your TV screen and yet she did not care to be used as an awkward comparison between CBS’s NFL coverage and its new acquisition of the Golden Globes. (“The big difference between the Golden Globes and the NFL: On the Golden Globes, fewer camera shots of Taylor Swift.”) Congratulations to her refusing to cave with a polite smile to either the initial hackness of Koy’s joke or his awkward “Sorry about that” apology. Or … was her deadpan reaction planned all along and we’re all caught in yet another one of her media countermoves? I’m getting a headache.
HIGH: Da’Vine Joy Randolph winning Best Supporting Actress for The Holdovers. True, her speech was a bit delivered, but she’s been doing great work in so many projects — Dolemite is My Name, High Fidelity, Only Murders in the Building, she was even the best thing in The Idol, and I do mean that as a compliment even though it might not sound like it — that it’s great to see her receive recognition, especially for a performance with such emotional range.
LOW: Ryan Gosling not winning for his performance as Ken in Barbie. Folks, what are we even doing? This is not Kenough!
LOW: Was that a SmartLess plug? Julia Garner telling people to only listen to Jason Bateman when he’s on a podcast … Jonathan Bailey saying “smart” … The pieces are coming together and they don’t sound good. (Nor do they make for an engaging TV show.)
HIGH: Matthew Macfadyen calling Tom Wambsgans a “human grease stain” in his acceptance speech. The show’s over but these guys are still dropping quippy insults.
HIGH: At least Keri Russell and Ray Romano had fun. An odd-couple pairing of people you like from TV presenting an award by doing a just-dumb-enough bit: swearing to be honest and then failing to come up with genuine compliments for each other’s projects. This is the kind of charmingly chaotic energy the Golden Globes should have every year but only managed in short spurts this time around.
HIGH: Koy’s performance as host made the presenter gags look like home runs. From this perspective, at least, we appreciate Koy’s sacrifice.
HIGH: Ayo Edebiri thanks the assistants of Hollywood who answer all her emails. She knows who really runs this industry!
HIGH: Kieran Culkin wins for Succession. “Ugh, nightmare,” he said immediately after getting on stage. Culkin then burped into the mic, told fellow nominee Pedro Pascal to “suck it,” and admitted to his wife that she was right, he should’ve just said thank you and left.
HIGH: Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy’s 20-year friendship. Nolan specifically shouted out the star of Oppenheimer (and Best Actor in a Drama winner) during his Best Director acceptance speech. Let us never forget that Nolan gave us Murphy at his hottest: A disheveled and deranged Scarecrow banging a gavel in The Dark Knight Rises. Bang away, Cillian!
LOW: Somewhere, a poor make-up artist is shaking their head at Cillian accepting an award with a bright red lipstick-covered nose. It’s cute! But also now his nice speech will forever have been given with lipstick-nose.
HIGH: Jennifer Lawrence mouthing to the camera, “If I don’t win, I am leaving” during the presentation for Best Lead Actress in a Musical or Comedy. That absolutely felt like a confession, not a joke.
WHOA: Who decided to seat Joaquin Phoenix, Jared Leto, and Nicolas Cage together? While Mark Hamill presented the award for Cinematic and Box Office Achievement, the camera gave us a glimpse at a table to his back left, at which sat Leto, Cage, and a very antsy Phoenix, none of whom seemed to be speaking to each other. It was weird. It seemed uncomfortable. We’ll get to work on an oral history immediately.
LOW: The existence of the Cinematic and Box Office Achievement in Cinema award. This was basically a “we need to give Barbie an award, so let’s invent one in case our voters don’t do it” trophy. Watching that montage of eight (!!) movies — several of which did not earn nominations elsewhere — really drove home the absurdity.
HIGH: At least Barbie won the Cinematic and Box Office Achievement in Cinema. It would have been incredibly awkward if it hadn’t.
LOW: That we don’t know what Kevin Costner was excitedly saying to Francesca Scorsese. On the one hand, it was a bit rude of Costner to keep talking to Francesca as Lee Sung Jin, Steven Yeun, and Ali Wong filed past him to accept the award for Best Limited Series for Beef. On the other hand, was he rightfully praising her TikTok feed? Asking if she’ll help promote his upcoming Horizon: An American Saga films? Spilling hot goss about Taylor Sheridan? We demand answers.
LOW: The set and stage design never works. The idea of a room that feels busy and intimate is fine! But presenters got confused about where to stand from one award to the next. The camera on the presenters felt way too close, which meant a lot of the bits didn’t land as well as they should have. And the winners kept getting lost on their way to the stage!
WHOA and HIGH and YES: Kieran Culkin kissing the hand of J. Smith Cameron after Succession’s win for Outstanding Drama. Roman kissed Gerri, which means we can pretend everything turned out fine between them!
HIGH: Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig pull off one supremely dumb, simple bit. Silly music came on while they tried to introduce an award, and they danced to it in a silly way. Then they blamed the Globes for the silly music, and pointed out that the room smelled like “hot sushi.” Sometimes the simplest stupid jokes are the best stupid jokes.
HIGH: Lily Gladstone’s acceptance speech. Gladstone gave the most powerful speech of the night while accepting the award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama, speaking in their Native Blackfeet language, noting the significance of their win as the first Indigenous actor in the category, acknowledging the allyship of director Martin Scorsese and co-stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, and dedicating the honor to “every little rez kid, every little urban kid, every little Native kid out there who has a dream.” If Golden Globe speeches are in any way an audition for the Oscars, Gladstone nailed it.
WHOA: Was this whole awards show a hostage situation? Why was everyone so dead-eyed and subdued? Why were the intros so shoddily written and woodenly delivered? Was everyone just caught in the loop of fame and capital that Hollywood uses to bend others to its will — and already exhausted by the fact that the Emmys are next week? Probably, yes.
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