The Soullessness of the 2026 Golden Globes

The Golden Globes were always a kind of warped funhouse mirror image of the Academy Awards—the drunker, looser, more easily bribable awards show than its culturally definitive counterpart. For years, it was run by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a tiny awards body comprised of mysterious, geriatric European journalists whose identities nobody knew, and their willingness to accept bribes for awards was so well-documented that by the time Ricky Gervais openly mocked the HFPA during his hosting gig in 2009, they invited him back the following year—and for four more years following that.

Gervais’ mean-spirited vision of Hollywood ended up embodying a key component of the Globes: a show that we all had fun watching because it was a drunken, half-corrupted mess, not in spite of it. I don’t want to wax too nostalgic on this subject, but the self-parodic sensibility of the Globes was the thing that occasionally allowed it to be unique and entertaining, rather than Just Another Stuffy Precursor to the Academy Awards. Moments like Colin Farrell winning the Best Actor award for In Bruges—a performance for which he was nominated almost nowhere else, least of all the Academy Awards—were the kind of weirdo wins that helped the show distinguish itself from its competitors (just don’t ask how he got the nomination).

I’d like to reiterate: this is a low bar, and is not worth celebrating unto itself. I’m just mentioning it here because this Sunday’s Golden Globes—the third show since Penske Media bought it and turned it into a for-profit company—was Just Another Stuffy Precursor to the Academy Awards. Or rather, it was trying to be, which feels even worse.

Nikki Glaser returned to host this year’s ceremony, her second after last year’s successful hosting gig, which was itself a redemption tour for Jo Koy’s disastrous attempt in the first post-Penske rendition of the show. Glaser was typically effective in the role of celebrity-baiting prankster, but her jokes were of a lower impact than usual, even compared to last year. The harshest shots were minor digs at the corporations currently running Hollywood, but “Sinners single-handedly saved Warner Bros.—for about a month” and “The award for most editing goes to CBS news” don’t really cut it for a show with a tradition of such raunchy, pointed attacks on bribery and celebrity. The jokes were fine, but terribly lackluster for a performance that refused to take significant shots at the corporate executives sitting in the room.

And there were so many executives in the room. The obscene upselling of Golden Globes table tickets is but one of many shameless sources of Succession-esque thievery that has marred these last few years at the Globes, and it makes me wonder if the presence of characters like David Zaslav and David Ellison—two of the most hated men in Hollywood today—had something to do with the mildness of Glaser’s performance. Was she intimidated by the threat of backlash from her billionaire boss? Did her jokes have to be pre-vetted by the Son King of Hollywood?

Whatever the case, it created a dispiriting atmosphere not dissimilar to the uber-rich mountain getaway of Mountainhead. That soulless shrine of ambient blandness was erected by a tasteless tech billionaire, which isn’t a bad description of this year’s Golden Globes—a ceremony in which Polymarket betting odds were displayed live on screen so that everyone in attendance could know who was going to win their awards long before they accepted them, and in which journalists Kevin Frazier and Marc Malkin color commentated the evening like sportscasters desperately searching for something interesting to say.

I found it all rather demoralizing, and while I’d like to hope that the corporate machinery undergirding these new Globes won’t define them, I have a hard time believing that its new structure will lead to anything other than utter bogus. And yes, awards telecasts are bogus anyway, but when Jessie Buckley and Teyana Taylor get onstage to accept their awards with tears in their eyes, a glimmer of purpose suddenly appears—there is the sense that great art means something in the public eye. Maybe that’s minor, but I think it’s worth preserving—and I’d much rather it be a drunken good time than another piece of corporate synergy.