The 2025 winners had been all around the map, portending a wide-open awards season.
Traditionally talking, the purpose of the Golden Globes has at all times been two-fold. First: Get some memorable speeches out of a bunch of celebrities packed right into a ballroom and plied with booze on nationwide tv. Second: Give some perception into who’s favored to win on the extra prestigious Academy Awards. For higher and worse, this 12 months’s Globes didn’t actually trouble to do both. Save for Kieran Culkin, not one of the winners appeared too buzzed to talk. In the meantime, the nebulous Hollywood International Press Affiliation of previous has been revamped and reformed with a brand new, broader group that has way more eclectic style. The 2025 winners had been all around the map, clarifying solely {that a} wide-open awards season lies forward.
By comparability, final 12 months’s Oscar race was settled six months earlier than the ceremony, because it simply so occurred that Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was each one of many 12 months’s most acclaimed and highest-grossing films. The inevitability of Oppenheimer gave voters the possibility to acknowledge a real theater-packing hit and quickly stave off existential crises about whether or not awards season actually issues anymore—at all times a priority, as important tastes have additional diverged from what audiences have a tendency to love.
This 12 months’s race, although, is probably the most unpredictable in a very long time. Forward of the Oscars, which happen March 2, spiky arthouse initiatives, foreign-language musicals, and brassy blockbusters are all elbowing for consideration. The Globes unfold the wealth to some early favorites, with Emilia Pérez and The Brutalist gaining probably the most traction. However smaller works resembling I’m Nonetheless Right here and A Totally different Man—which is likely to be fortunate to get any Oscar love in any respect—additionally scored large.
Emilia Pérez received probably the most film awards with 4, although moreover Finest Musical or Comedy, its solely different main trophy went to Zoe Saldaña for Supporting Actress. In any other case, a sweep for the Netflix-distributed musical drama a couple of transsexual cartel chief—which led all films with 10 nominations—didn’t fairly materialize. Nonetheless, it pointedly nabbed the massive prize over Depraved, a smash hit that has dominated the zeitgeist since Thanksgiving. That movie was as an alternative given the Cinematic and Field Workplace Achievement award, a chintzy pat on the pinnacle cooked up for final 12 months’s Globes ceremony. (Barbie, a equally populist hit that didn’t win the highest prizes, obtained it then.)
On the extra severe facet, the muscular epic The Brutalist received Finest Drama, together with Finest Director for Brady Corbet and Finest Actor in a Drama for its lead, Adrien Brody, who performs a Hungarian architect struggling in post-war America. At 215 minutes, it makes a heftier ask of audiences than most movies, however Corbet’s speech was a passionate entreaty for Hollywood to help riskier work. “No one was asking for a three-and-a-half-hour movie a couple of midcentury designer, in 70-millimeter,” he stated. Tonight, it was feted nonetheless. The Globe wins may frivolously anoint The Brutalist and Emilia Pérez as Oscar favorites, however each are nonetheless comparatively exterior of the mainstream, and hardly a certain factor. One other film—be it a box-office hit like Depraved, a extra down-the-middle favourite like A Full Unknown, or a important fave like Sean Baker’s Anora, which oddsmakers had predicted for 3 Globes however which ended up with none—may simply problem them, come March.
The reconstituted Hollywood International Press additionally took some swings that felt very removed from the Globes of previous, which typically appeared prefer it rewarded initiatives that had despatched one of the best present baskets to voters. Circulate, a tiny, dialogue-free Latvian film a couple of cat, beat out The Wild Robotic and Inside Out 2 for greatest animated movie. Fernanda Torres received Finest Actress in a Drama for the charged Brazilian movie I’m Nonetheless Right here, over celebrities resembling Angelina Jolie and Nicole Kidman. Sebastian Stan picked up Finest Actor in a Musical or Comedy for A Totally different Man, an acidic although little-seen satire—it grossed underneath $1 million throughout its U.S. theatrical run.
Perhaps the most important shock of the evening was Demi Moore’s upset win for Finest Actress in a Musical or Comedy for The Substance, a spectacular piece of gross-out horror that has managed to remain within the awards dialog regardless of being loaded with gore and nudity. Moore beat out the ostensible favourite Mikey Madison (of Anora), megastar Zendaya (of Challengers) and Emilia Pérez’s Karla Sofía Gascón. Her success very a lot throws a bomb into that Oscar class, and will beef up a film I had figured was too lurid for historically stuffy awards voters.
All of those surprising wins did come on the expense of high-grossing films that viewers at residence have truly seen. The Brutalist is simply now beginning its wider theatrical rollout, whereas confirmed hits resembling Depraved, Dune: Half Two, and Challengers had been largely missed because the evening dragged on. A crowded Oscar race approaches—and if it seems to be just like the moneymakers aren’t selecting up steam, business observers will as soon as once more ponder the purpose of an awards season that doesn’t attempt to replicate the general public’s tastes. If that should be the case, at the least Golden Globe voters acquired appreciably bizarre with it.