The 2025 Golden Globes were an interim awards

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. Thankfully, from one of Glazer’s opening remarks — “I feel like I’ve finally made it — I’m in a room full of producers at the Beverley Hilton hotel, and this time, all my clothes are on” — it was clear that she had the assured, gag-filled demeanor of a true host, and her jokes — which, perhaps wisely, steered away from the controversy du jour, the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni contretemps — managed a mixture of affection and roasting without ever veering into genuinely dangerous Ricky Gervais territory.

The film awards were a far more eclectic selection than might have been imagined. Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is increasingly looking like the serious Oscar front-runner with wins for Best Drama, Best Director and Best Actor for its star Adrien Brody, about whom Glazer quipped, “Who else is here? Oh look! It’s two-time Holocaust survivor Adrien Brody!” Though The Brutalist has severe competition from Jacques Audiard’s quite insane Emilia Pérez, which won Best Comedy/Musical, Best Film Not in the English Language, Best Song and Best Supporting Actress for Zoe Saldaña.

The Academy may go down the Oppenheimer route and pick The Brutalist — another somber three-hour-plus drama exploring the psychological fall-out from World War Two  — or it might have a frivolous moment and anoint Emilia Pérez in the same spirit as the wild Everything Everywhere All At Once. Or, of course, there’s Wicked, which had to content itself with the runner-up prize of Box Office Achievement, a non-award given out to films that made a lot of money for the industry.

There were plenty of shocks and surprises outside the two front-runners. Demi Moore cemented her comeback with The Substance by winning Best Actress (bizarrely the film was labeled as a Musical or Comedy), and Fernanda Torres took the same prize for Drama for her performance in the little-seen Portuguese film I’m Still Here. I was deeply disappointed to find that the brilliant The Wild Robot lost out on Best Animated Picture to the silent indie film Flow, but Kieran Culkin’s victory for Best Supporting Actor for A Real Pain — coincidentally once again beating his Succession co-star Jeremy Strong, whose intense and deeply committed manner has alienated some of his colleagues — was a popular one that should see him ride this wave all the way to the Oscars.

If you’d watched the Emmys, you could have predicted most of the television awards, and so it proved; Baby Reindeer cleaned up in the Limited category, Shōgun in the Best Drama Series, and Hacks beat Globes perennial The Bear to Best Musical or Comedy Series. The last was unsurprising, not least because there is continued existential debate about whether The Bear can really be described as a comedy any longer, or whether it would be better off running in the (more competitive) drama category. The Golden Globes loves honoring celebrities (why else would Kate Winslet have been nominated for her atypically awful performance in the dire The Regime?), and so the wins for Jodie Foster and Colin Farrell for their appearances in True Detective and The Penguin, while not undeserved, speak more about the ceremony’s wish to get some famous faces in the mix along with the lesser-known.

Everyone will have their own grievances and delights as to this year’s award recipients, and it’s certainly true that there is no Oppenheimer-shaped juggernaut heading towards March’s Oscar ceremony. I suggested last year that this was an interim awards, and nothing I saw made me change my mind on that front, but the momentum building behind Corbet and his remarkable, challenging (and 215-minute-long!) movie suggests that, if all goes well, one of the most interesting and unusual mainstream films for years could be receiving the recognition that it, and its director, so richly deserves.