Pleasant Surprises from the Golden Globes

The HFPA has since cleaned up its act, diversified its membership, and rebranded itself as the Golden Globe Foundation. Thanks to what Lawson calls host Nikki Glaser’s “effervescent comedy” and some genuine suspense in wide-open races in the film categories, last night’s ceremony “provided what we come to these things for: a sense of dramatic stakes happily offset by frivolity, the giddy feeling that all of this matters a great deal while somehow not mattering at all.”

Few were predicting that Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist would win Best Motion Picture, Drama; Best Director, Motion Picture; and Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama for Adrien Brody. “Nobody was asking for a three-and-a-half-hour film about a midcentury designer on 70 mm,” said Corbet. “But it works.” Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez won four awards, including Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy, and as the Atlantic’s David Sims notes, “it pointedly nabbed the big prize over Wicked, a smash hit that has dominated the zeitgeist since Thanksgiving. That film was instead given the Cinematic and Box Office Achievement award, a chintzy pat on the head cooked up for last year’s Globes ceremony.”

For many, the emotional highlight of the evening came when Demi Moore, the star of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, won the Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy. It was, as Jason P. Frank points out at Vulture, “her first-ever acting award and, boy, was she ready, locked, and loaded with a rousing speech. It was memorized; it has sections.” Moore noted that thirty years ago, she was dismissed as “a popcorn actress,” but “today I celebrate this as a marker of my wholeness and of the love that is driving me, and the gift of doing something I love and being reminded that I do belong.” Frank notes that when Kerry Washington took the stage to present the next award, she quipped, “Good luck to the next person.”

Nearly thirty years ago, Fernanda Montenegro was nominated for Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Drama for her performance in Walter Salles’s Central Station (1998). She didn’t win, but on Sunday night, her daughter Fernanda Torres did, for her turn in I’m Still Here—directed by Walter Salles. Other acting accolades went to Sebastian Stan (A Different Man), Zoe Saldaña (Emilia Pérez), and Kieran Culkin (A Real Pain).

The evening’s biggest surprise came when Gints Zilbalodis’s Flow won Best Motion Picture, Animated, edging out such big hits as Pixar’s Inside Out 2 and Dreamworks’s The Wild Robot. Variety’s Jamie Lang calls the win “a major upset,” noting that Flow “made waves simply by earning a nomination in a category traditionally dominated by big-budget studio films.”

Accepting the award, Zilbalodis told the glammed-up audience that “this is the first time that a film from Latvia has been here, so this is huge for us. This is a very personal story to me because I used to work alone. I made all my films by myself, but this time, I worked with a team, and just like the cat in Flow, I had to learn to trust others and learn how to collaborate and overcome our differences. I think it’s very important to remember this nowadays.”