It’s easy to hate on the Golden Globes.
For starters, this flagrantly unserious awards show regularly causes jaws to drop thanks to its misuse of the word “best.” (See: Emily in Paris being nominated for Best Musical or Comedy Series in 2021.) Second, no one at the Golden Globes even takes themselves seriously, lending the ceremony a reputation for being boozy, loopy, and distressingly unpredictable. This makes the Golden Globes less of “appointment viewing” and more of “accidental and while high” viewing. Third, and not unseriously, the Golden Globes voting body is historically and definitively corrupt, and no one in Hollywood can ignore that. Denzel Washington even admitted it during his acceptance speech for the 2016 Cecil B. DeMille Award. So, with all this in mind, I have some extremely valuable suggestions for how the Globes can stop being the TV version of your one cousin who’s in prison.
Celebrities already let loose at the Golden Globes, so my suggestion is to just make that worse. I can guarantee you that more people will tune in to the Globes if there’s the possibility of Emma Thompson drunkenly flinging her panties at Colin Farrell during an In Memoriam segment. Of course, this won’t solve the Globes’ more systemic problems (see below), but it will at least increase the chances of seeing Taylor Swift passed out on a pizza. Think of the memes! Do it for the memes, Globes!
The people who vote for the Golden Globes awards – the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) – are nobodies. Literally, they’re a bunch of random writers who have supposedly worked for foreign publications and are now paid $75,000 a year to nominate Emily in Paris for Best Comedy. That’s it. They’re not even in the industry! Also, the Hollywood producers seeking Golden Globe nominations for their films know this very well. They understand that the only thing random nobody writers want in the world is to take selfies with Julia Roberts, so they fly said writers around the world to swanky parties with Julia Roberts and effectively buy nominations for Julia Roberts. To this I say: Let’s have less of that! (But still nominate Julia Roberts. Julia Roberts is a national treasure.)
Sorry, I have more to say about how corrupt the Golden Globes are. Like, you know how I mentioned that Golden Globes voters accept bribes? Well, what if I told you that the billionaire who controls the Golden Globes is also corrupt? A billionaire? Corrupt?? Can you believe it??? Billionaire Todd Boehly, whose Eldridge Industries governs the Globes, is a minority stake owner in production company MRC, which perhaps unsurprisingly produces many of the films and series that receive Golden Globe nominations (and, in doing so, bring more money to MRC, and Todd Boehly). On top of that, Boehly is an investor in Penske Media, which owns many film and TV industry-adjacent sites such as Variety and Rolling Stone that would probably criticize the Golden Globes if they weren’t owned by their boss. To this I say: Let’s have less of this, too!
OK, I’m still not done! There’s at least one more corrupt thing that the Golden Globes do and for which they should be roundly criticized. Though the Globes’ voting body has acquired hundreds of people of color ever since the Internet collectively realized that the HFPA had no Black members, the Globes still refuses to pay these new members, who are again people of color. That means that the only members of the Golden Globes body not receiving a $75,000 salary are the Black members. You’d think that a voting body who’s so concerned about optics would want to look less like a red state country club. Alas, selfies with Julia Roberts are apparently more important than paying Black people a fair wage. So, to this I say: Less of this over here, as well!
…which is that Tina Fey and Amy Poehler should host the Golden Globes again, because the world was a simpler and better place in 2013, 2014, and 2015 (but not in 2021), and I wish we could all get along like we used to in middle school.
