The Golden Globes have a history as convoluted and tortured as the ceremony is glitzy and wasted. This year, the voting body once again tried to reinvent itself with a new category (Best Podcast) while still pretending to offer a peek into Hollywood glamour, and the resulting ceremony was a lot of mania and little coherence. Intrusive attempts to keep the audience engaged included relentless commentary from journalists Marc Malkin and Kevin Frazier and an unnerving partnership with betting platform Polymarket, while the celebs themselves failed to address anything political, an apprehension that must’ve made both CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and the Ellison family pleased. But even as they looked increasingly downmarket, the Globes still delivered some charming Hollywood fun. Nikki Glaser is the steadiest hand in the hosting business right now, and it’s always fun to see the stars let loose and have a little fun. Sometimes they even provided the rose-tinted illusion that Hollywood is doing just fine. Turns out Leonardo DiCaprio’s a good sport, Julia Roberts is a giant Eva Victor fan, and Queen Latifah still thinks of Dakota Fanning as “my friend from The Secret Life of Bees.” It’s like the dream factory still lives on. Isn’t that magical? —Jackson McHenry
HIGH: Nikki Glaser quickly and delightfully sears the crowd.
Glaser was back for her second stint as a host of the Globes this year, and as soon as she stepped to the podium for her monologue, she commanded the room like a pro. Glaser specializes in roasts, and though she threw out more than a few sharpened zingers, they tended to land on the targets who could take it. Kevin Hart received more than a few punches about his height and the Jumanji movies, and Sean Penn sat dazedly through a punchline about how he travels to the most dangerous places on earth to do cocaine. As for the corporate Hollywood nonsense everyone in the room would be happy to rag on, Glaser had pointed lines about the Warner Bros. sale and how CBS News has become the place to “See BS news.” We can all support some dumb wordplay! —JM
LOW: “You are all already winners, ladies!”
Look, not every presenter can rely on sexual-tension banter, opposites-attract banter, or secretly-in-competition-with-each-other banter. But whenever a pair has to assure the nominees that they’re already winners, like Jennifer Garner and Amanda Seyfried did for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture, you can tell the ceremony’s writers hit a wall and needed to pad for time. We gotta come up with some new clichés. —Roxana Hadadi
HIGH: Teyana Taylor’s win.
Whichever producer decided to make this the first award of the night, good job. Taylor’s Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture win for One Battle After Another kicked off the ceremony with a fantastic jolt, and Taylor’s speech about working with Paul “Let Him Cook” Thomas Anderson was sincere, revealing, funny, and passionate, all the mercurial qualities Taylor used to bring Perfidia Beverly Hills to life. Her message to “my brown sisters and little brown girls” that “our light does not need permission to shine … our dreams deserve space” was lovely, her dance off stage to “My Boo” was charming, and her thong really did look great. A solid way to get the Golden Globes going. —RH
LOW: Andor’s losses.
It’s fine. It’s just one of the best TV shows ever made. It’s not like it deserved more awards than it got nominated for, or should have won the awards it actually did get nods for. It’s fine. Thanks for the mustache and the memories, Diego Luna. —RH
HIGH: “I’m Zoë Kravitz, and I have my own shrooms.”
Probably the most honest thing said all night! — RH
WHOA: The playlist.
Nikki Glaser walked out to deliver her monologue to the tune of Taylor Swift’s “Style” and exited to Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Run Away With Me.” Stellan Skarsgard marched up to the podium to the tune of “Yeah!” by Usher. When Noah Wyle walked offstage after his speech, the DJ played “Backstreet’s Back.” Did a gay guy I went to college with in 2015 have control of the aux cord? —JM
LOW: Marc Malkin and Kevin Frazier’s completely unnecessary play-by-play.
For reasons known only to the producers, the telecast assigned Variety’s Malkin and Entertainment Tonight’s Frazier to fill every second of dead air as winners made their way to the stage. There is, in fact, nothing wrong with letting applause, ambient noise, and the DJ’s unhinged music choices float, but instead, we got pablum about Julia Roberts and Jean Smart having a “goddess off”, pointless trivia like “Leonardo Dicaprio turned down Boogie Nights for Titanic, but here we are,” and occasional banter threaded through the Globes’ cursed Polymarket integration. “Looks like Good Hang with Amy Poehler is running away with the leaderboard.” I’ve had intrusive thoughts less annoying. —NQ
LOW: Those Polymarket tie-ins.
In between categories, Malkin and Frazier offered commentary via betting data for upcoming presentations. Leave that nonsense to sports! The Golden Globes are a pure and true celebration of artistry that stand for unflinching moral justice and should not be sullied by avarice! —JM
HIGH: Nikki Glaser’s Kidman-esque salute to podcasts.
Glaser recreated Kidman’s beloved AMC ad by putting on a lookalike suit and announcing that “we come to our cars for podcasts.” She waxed poetic about the art form in between clips of Bombas ads — we caught Griffin Newman’s voice there, if you’re a fan of a specific kind of movie podcast — and captured the somewhat humiliating feeling of needing someone to talk in your ear while you commute. (“Somehow, discourse feels good in a place like this.”) The category is an embarrassing thing to have in an awards show, but the sketch was fun. —JM
LOW, also WHAT? and WHY?: The Best Podcast Category, in general.
There was never a universe in which the Best Podcast category wasn’t going to feel deeply weird. And so it was, from Snoop Dogg ambling out to present the award, to the decision to air clips from the podcasts themselves (especially when the Best Supporting Actor categories didn’t get the same treatment), to the bizarro juxtaposition of NPR’s Up First sharing space on the nominee list with SmartLess. The fact that the category’s inclusion almost certainly displaced Best Score from the broadcast only adds to an overall decline-of-civilization vibe. —NQ
WHOA: How heavy are the Golden Globes?
Teyana Taylor, Ejae, and Maggie Kang all commented on its weight. Is that thing solid? Could we melt it down for currency when the international economy eventually collapses thanks to all the dumb imperialist moves this country has gotten up to lately? Much to consider. —RH
WHOA: Shout-out to Bobby Cannavale.
Rose Byrne’s husband was apparently not present to see her win Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy because he was attending Repticon 2026 in New Jersey. I would clown, but I get it. —NQ
HIGH: Leonardo DiCaprio’s finger-forward fun.
Pointing at his own eyes, pointing at someone else’s eyes, whipping it left, whipping it right, waggling it to his lips. Whatever’s going with him during the commercial breaks, it’s good. —NQ
HIGH: “Queen Latifah, wow! Can’t believe it.”
The passage of time means that Adolescence now feels like it came out 87 years ago, but Stephen Graham getting distracted by the Equalizer as he wrapped up his Best Actor in a Limited Series speech was a nice moment of “Hollywood sure is weird” abruptness. Graham’s really fun in A Thousand Blows right now, FYI. —RH
HIGH: Wanda Sykes’s tight five on the comedy nominees.
Sykes provided a sleek and cutting intro to the comedians vying for the stand-up award, noting how Kevin Hart was the richest guy nominated but also the one who most wanted to win (“A true American!”) and that Kumail Nanjiani has proven you can still be funny if you look good. But her best material was a joke about having to accept the award for Ricky Gervais, who wasn’t there: “You’re going to thank God and the trans community.”—JM
LOW: Not a good night for It Was Just an Accident.
For nearly the entire festival season, Jafar Panahi’s made-in-secret It Was Just an Accident felt like the anointed foreign-film frontrunner, and that was reflected in its three Globe nominations for Best Director, Best Motion Picture – Non-English Language, and Best Motion Picture – Drama. But it lost all three tonight, while two of Neon’s other films, Sentimental Value and The Secret Agent, came away with statuettes. Meanwhile, large-scale protests against the Iranian government have roiled the country for weeks, which feels more important than all this, anyway. —RH
LOW: UFC Sponcon.
The lead-up to the hotly anticipated HudCon presentation involved … what appears to be a UFC ad? I think? Hard to find any other explanation for the inexplicable catwalk by two people in tactical garb, one of them carrying a UFC title belt. Paramount picked up UFC rights last summer, and this was presumably an attempt to let us know about it? I guess? I haven’t seen brand integration this weird since Ebon Moss-Bachrach peddled Johnnie Walker Blue Label at the 2024 Emmys. —NQ
WHOA: Guess these famous people haven’t kept up with their hockey smut?
The Globes really pushed the celebrity of Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, who rocketed to fame by the success of their skate-crossed lovers in Heated Rivalry. The two were charming when tasked with doing a presenter bit about how everyone in the audience (and their trainers, daughters, and wives) had seen them naked, but they got a muted response from the actual people in the audience. In a way, it makes sense — they’ve all been busy campaigning! Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t have the time to figure out how to login to HBOMax. —JM
HIGH: Rhea Seehorn wins for Pluribus!
I’m also counting this for Better Call Saul. —NQ
LOW: The seating plan.
For viewers at home, little Google Maps pins would show where the nominees were seated in the crowd. That information provides no functionality to the audience, and it’s especially weird because the seating plan this year felt way more “shove the writers and creators in the back” than usual. Seehorn couldn’t find Pluribus creator Vince Gilligan when she wanted to thank him during her Best Actress speech, and Noah Wyle had to wait around for The Pitt creator R. Scott Gemmill and executive producer John Wells to make it to the stage to accept Best Television Drama for The Pitt. Would putting the people who actually created these series closer to the front — or at least seating them with their cast — really be so hard? It would certainly be better than loading the front-row tables with executives. —RH
LOW: Marc Malkin mispronouncing Martin Scorsese’s name.
It’s “seh-zze,” not “say-zee.” Do your job, Marc. It’s embarrassing when Fox Nation is doing it correctly and you aren’t. — RH
HIGH: A very tipsy Julia Roberts.
The classically louche yet confidently glitzy Golden Globes energy had been missing for much of the night until Roberts, a true movie star who couldn’t care less, came onstage to present the award for Best Musical or Comedy. She had clearly been sampling the champagne on offer and rambled, thanking Kevin Hart for sticking around even after they both lost their categories and provided a charmingly random and extended shoutout to Eva Victor and Sorry, Baby. Then she casually flicked open the envelope to give the Globe to One Battle After Another. A true class act! —JM
LOW: The near total absence of politics.
You would think that, in a month when an ICE agent killed a civilian, the U.S. government effectively kidnapped a foreign head of state, and protests are tearing through Iran — on top of everything else that’s still going on — that the mostly liberal Hollywood would use the Globes’ platform to address the moment directly. Instead, there was some pin wearing and a few zingers from Glaser’s opening monologue, and that was it. Some winners, including films like The Secret Agent and shows like The Pitt, were theoretically well positioned to say something, but they mostly kept it festive. Maybe everyone’s exhausted. Or maybe everyone sees David Ellison in the room. —NQ
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