2025 Golden Globes: The best, worst and weirdest moments from a show that probably shouldn’t exist | Canada Voices

It was only two years ago that the Golden Globe Awards — Hollywood’s second- (or maybe third- or fourth-?) biggest night! — seemed destined for death.

Thanks to various scandals within the Hollywood Foreign Press Association that oversaw the awards show — including a lack of diversity among voters and general accusations of cronyism — the Globes was dangerously close to getting not only metaphorically cancelled but pushed off the actual airwaves, too. In 2022, the only evidence that the organization even still existed was a zombified awards gala that took place in a celebrity-free L.A. ballroom, the winners announced via a widely mocked Twitter feed.

It turns out, though, that all the Globes needed to survive were the corporate interests of a Hollywood monopoly.

With the Globes now under the control of the Penske Media Corporation — the same company that owns nearly every Hollywood news outlet, including Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, IndieWire, Billboard, Rolling Stone, and more — all the negative press surrounding the organization magically disappeared. Where celebrities once shunned the awards — no less a figure than Tom Cruise returned his three statuettes in disgust – all of film and television’s stars have come running back to embrace the Globes, with Sunday night’s red carpet jammed as if nothing controversial had ever happened. Up to and including the leads of the evening’s major winners: Shogun and Hacks on the TV side, The Brutalist and Emilia Perez on the film end of things.

Before Penske Media begins its inevitable hostile takeover of the Academy Awards, The Globe and Mail presents the best, worst, and weirdest moments from the 82nd annual Golden Globe Awards.

‘The Brutalist,’ ‘Emilia Perez’ win top film honors at Golden Globes

THE GOOD-ISH

Glaser Vision

After hiring two disastrous hosts in a row — an exceptionally righteous Jerrod Carmichael burned the place down with his brutal celebrity takedowns in 2023, while the cringe-worthy Jo Koy flopped harder than Joe Biden last year — the Globes tried to shift toward the centre with this year’s master of ceremonies, comedian Nikki Glaser. Barrelling through her opening monologue as if waiting for an Uber outside the doors of the Beverly Hilton, Glaser hit upon all the expected gags (“Welcome to Ozempic’s biggest night!”), with a curious emphasis on the hair stylings of Timothée Chalamet (who would get the single highest number of shout-outs from the evening’s other presenters).

Aside from a well-deserved dig at the Globes’ former broadcaster NBC (”Eddie Redmayne’s new series is about a too-secret elite sniper who no one can find because he’s on Peacock”) and a sharp closing joke that made the entire room squirm — a cleverly layered and extra-dark dig that involved serial killers, sexual abusers, and how Hollywood is generally run by misogyny — Glaser got in and got out with minimal damage. Congratulations, I suppose?

Brute Force

Upon winning his much-deserved award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama, The Brutalist star Adrien Brody seemed on the verge of tears. Dedicating the win to his mother and father, Brody brought back memories of his similarly monumental Oscar win for The Pianist more than two decades ago, in 2003. Crucially, though, this time the actor didn’t force an open-mouthed kiss between him and presenter Gal Gadot, à la his infamous onstage assault of Halle Berry.

THE GENUINELY GOOD

Avatar: The Way of Weeping

The long underrecognized Zoe Saldana took home the first big award of the evening after winning (deep breath) Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role in Any Motion Picture for her work in Netflix’s polarizing narco-musical Emilia Perez — although she also took home the unofficial honour for the evening’s best teary-eyed speech. “This is a first time for me, and I’m just so blessed that I’m sharing this moment with [costars] Selena and Karla and our fellow nominees,” Saldana said through a river of tears. “I know that it is a competition but all that I have witnessed is just us showing up for each other and celebrating each other and it’s just so beautiful.” And with her win, Saldana has inched that much closer to being nominated for, if not winning, her first Academy Award.

Son of a Shogun

Japan’s Tadanobu Asano stole the evening with an acceptance speech that was both sincere, surprising, and candid. “Maybe you don’t know me, I’m an actor from Japan and my name is Tadanobu Asano!” the Shogun star said upon accepting the award for (even deeper breath here) Best Supporting Actor in a Series, Limited Series, Anthology Series, or Motion Picture Made for Television. “Thank you so much. Thank you so much! [I’m currently] filming, I have to come back to Tokyo tonight. Tomorrow morning, I go to shooting again. But, this is very big present for me!”

Golden Globes red carpet: Ariana Grande eschews Glinda pink for pale yellow (brick road) silk

He’s Still Standing

Elton John easily got the biggest, and most well-earned, laugh of the evening when presenting the award for Best Original Score — Motion Picture (which deservedly went to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for Challengers). While onstage alongside fellow musician Brandi Carlile, John addressed recent reports going around that his eyesight had deteriorated due to an infection. Nothing could be further from the truth, John insisted, and it was “so great to be here with my cohost, Rihanna!”

THE BAD

Patter Matters

Whenever Glaser wasn’t in front of the camera — and, yes, sometimes when she was — the show’s writing staff seemed to be taking a vape break. The scripted onstage patter between presenters such as Harrison Ford and Anthony Mackie, or Ariana DeBose and Ke Huy Quan, or Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Yeoh, was often so dire, so uninspired, that it made you long for the ribaldry and wit of Elon Musk’s X feed. By the time that Canadians Seth Rogen and Catherine O’Hara got up to riff on their homegrown work — a bit that quickly devolved into something involving the Golden Antler Awards, an Alanis Morissette biopic, and our country’s deep and not entirely untrue affection for pornography (just don’t try to Google ”Mooseknuckles: Two Knuckles Deep”) — you would be forgiven for thinking that the Globes writers got into the show via a fraudulent H-1B1 visa arrangement orchestrated by the Canadian Screen Awards.

Follow the Money

Last year, the Globes introduced the wholly embarrassing “Cinematic and Box Office Achievement” award, designed to single out “the year’s most acclaimed, highest-earning and/or most viewed films that have garnered extensive global audience support and attained cinematic excellence.” One would assume that hundreds of millions of dollars in box-office receipts would be enough of an honour for such eligible productions. And yet Wicked director Jon M. Chu seemed to think the award was the highest distinction in the land, given his gushy speech: “It shows us how important making this stuff is in a time when pessimism and cynicism sort of rule the planet right now, that we could still make art that is a radical act of optimism.” My man, your movie made a lot of cash and sparked some memes — it didn’t save the world. Dial it back.

THE WEIRD

Touched By an Angle

Among the many curious decisions made by the Globes’ producers was exactly where to place that little old thing called “the camera.” From capturing presenters from odd side angles or swirling the camera around award-winners as if they were filming their very first TikTok video, the telecast’s crew seemed to be operating on one direction: make sure you make the most beautiful people in the world look like absolute garbage.

Clips Got Clipped

If the goal of the Golden Globes is, at least partially, to make audiences aware of just what movies and television shows worthy of their time were out there, then perhaps showing clips of the nominated performances might do the trick. Instead, producers decided to only show full-fledged clips when it came to the music and stand-up comedy categories. Maybe one day, though, we’ll all discover why, for instance, Kieran Culkin won the Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture award for A Real Pain. Maybe!