The Golden Globes Were Too Big to Fail - The New York Times

Did the awards get their legitimacy back? You can’t regain what you never had.

The big winner of last night’s Golden Globes was the Golden Globes. Please hold your applause. As is sometimes the case with awards, whether or not the victory was merited was beside the point. It was foreordained.

The Globes and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which puts them on, won from the moment that NBC decided to put them back on TV, after taking a year off following the organization’s scandals over racism and corruption.

The trophy was a prime-time broadcast replete with film and TV stars serving red-carpet looks. The implicit message was: “All is forgiven — now please watch our movies and shows and buy the sponsors’ products!”

“The biggest party in Hollywood is back!” an NBC promo announced. And who wanted to be a party pooper by dwelling on what it was back from?

That job fell to the host, the comedian Jerrod Carmichael. The decision to return the Globes to TV may have been questionable, but at least it resulted in the best awards-show opening monologue I have ever heard.

Really, what Carmichael delivered was less a monologue than a talk, a brief wrestle with the ideas of success and complicity. “I’ll tell you why I’m here,” he opened. “I’m here because I’m Black.”

His performance was like a confessional comedy special condensed into a few minutes. He paced, sat at the edge of the stage and unburdened himself. Here he was, a brilliant Black comic, landing a gig that ratified his undeniable talent but that also conveniently served the H.F.P.A.’s image-laundering purposes. “I won’t say they were a racist organization,” he said, “but they didn’t have a single Black member until George Floyd died, so do with that information what you will.”

The crowd laughed sparingly and uncomfortably. I’m not even sure that Carmichael was trying to make them laugh so much as to make them think, and to think things through himself. Should he even be there? On the other hand, why should one group’s failings deny him a career coup (and, in his telling, $500,000)?

You could also say that, in so doing, he gave the rest of the room space to enjoy the night and avoid the subject. Once he threw himself on the grenade of controversy, the stars could safely bypass it on the way to the stage.

Certainly, if the rest of Hollywood was having similarly complicated feelings about the Globes, it largely kept them to itself amid all the thank yous to the H.F.P.A.

There was the occasional reference to the recent troubles. On the red carpet, Sheryl Lee Ralph of “Abbott Elementary” talked about getting her first Globe nomination in “a year when the Hollywood Foreign Press would open up its hearts and its minds to an understanding that diversity actually works.”

A few celebs were conspicuous by their absence. Brendan Fraser, the star of “The Whale,” had announced that he would boycott because of the H.F.P.A.’s handling of his charge that a former leader of the group groped him in 2003. Tom Cruise returned his three Globe trophies in 2021, a gesture that Carmichael joked about onstage.

In her awards remarks, the H.F.P.A.’s president, Helen Hoehne, spoke vaguely of “a year of momentous change for our organization” and pledged to “continue to add representation to our organization from around the world.”

But while the H.F.P.A. wants to brand itself as owning the failures of its past, those went mostly undetailed in the broadcast.

Rich Polk/NBC, via Getty Images

This was not the Globes’ first second chance. The Federal Communications Commission forced the awards off TV in the late 1960s on charges that it had “misled the public as to how the winners were determined.” In 1982, the Globes notoriously named Pia Zadora the “new star of the year,” an honor underwritten by her billionaire husband’s lavish wining and dining of H.F.P.A. members.

The 2021 Los Angeles Times investigation that found that the H.F.P.A. had no Black members also detailed reports of unethical influence and of members snorkeling up freebies, like an extravagant junket to the French shooting location of “Emily in Paris” before that show’s baffling nomination. Hollywood responded indignantly — finally — and NBC skipped last year’s show.

That was a year ago. Last fall, NBC cited the H.F.P.A.’s “commitment to ongoing change.” (The group added Black members and said that it had made changes to its ethics practices; there were, notably, a healthy amount of nominees and winners of color on Tuesday night.) It agreed to bring back the cameras, without which the Globes might as well not exist.

The Globes began as an industry event in 1944, a gambit to increase the small journalistic group’s pull. Their arrival on national TV in the 1960s made them a flea under a magnifying glass. They were what the historian Daniel Boorstin described in “The Image” as a “pseudo-event,” a manufactured happening given the appearance of importance by media coverage.

Nearly everybody got something for playing along. TV got a lucrative special; audiences got a breezy, often wild show; the entertainment media got headlines and clicks; stars and studios got a promotional platform; and the H.F.P.A. got legitimacy. (My hands are not clean either. I have spent years as a TV critic pretending to care about the Golden Globes because I wrote for publications that wanted coverage of the Golden Globes.)

But because everyone acknowledged that the Globes were frothy and frivolous, for a long time the mutually agreed-on charade seemed innocuous enough. Over time the jokes — that the awards were a boozy goof put on by a tiny, sketchy organization — made it from insider snark to podium monologue.

In 2011, the host Ricky Gervais japed that H.F.P.A. members didn’t nominate “The Tourist” just to hang out with Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp, “They also accepted bribes.” In 2020, a year before the revelation that the H.F.P.A. had no Black members, he explained that the dearth of nominees of color was because the association “is just very, very racist.”

The Globes were inoculated by irony. If they were merely a harmless joke, maybe everyone could look past it and enjoy the passionate and zany speeches.

But the awards had become too big to be harmless. They generated millions of dollars in advertising. They had a big promotional effect and influence on the rest of awards season, which meant big money for studios and careers made (or not) on the capricious decisions of a suspect group. Where there are actual stakes, there can be actual loss and actual harm.

Those stakes, however, appear also to have made the Golden Globes too big to fail. The latest scandals should have been the end of them, at least as a major media event. (Talent should be recognized, but no one is entitled to get an award on national TV.) NBC could yet put an end to all of this by cutting off the attention spigot — it has the Globes on a one-year contract — though it’s just as likely that falling ratings could finish off the awards some year as any ethical lapses.

In the meantime, the twisted irony is that the Globes’ scandals could leave them seeming more weighty, more august, more important than they did before. After all, the premise of much of this year’s coverage — did the Globes rehabilitate themselves? — implies that they had credibility to lose in the first place.

Here too Carmichael may have had the best word: “I took this job assuming they hadn’t changed at all.” For now, at least, the Golden Globes are back, too big to fail, but perhaps not too big to fail upward.

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