After scandal and several troubled years, the Golden Globes are ready for a comeback.
The revamped group, now a for-profit endeavor with a larger and more diverse voting body, is announcing nominations Monday for its January awards show.
In addition to nominations for films, shows and actors, segmented between comedy/musical and drama, the 2024 show will have two new categories: cinematic and box office achievement and best stand-up comedian on television.
Analysts expect films like “Barbie,” “Oppenheimer,” “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Maestro,” “Poor Things” and “The Color Purple” will be among the top nominees.
Stars and studios boycotted the Globes and NBC refused to air it in 2022 as a result. After the group added journalists of color to its ranks and instituted other reforms to address ethical concerns, the show came back in January 2023 in a one-year probationary agreement with NBC. The network did not opt to renew.
In June, billionaire Todd Boehly was granted approval to dissolve the HFPA and reinvent the Golden Globes as a for-profit organization. Its assets were acquired by Boehly’s Eldridge Industries, along with dick clark productions, a group that is owned by Penske Media whose assets also include Variety, Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone and Billboard. In mid-November, CBS announced that it would air the ceremony on the network on Jan. 7. It will also stream on Paramount+.
The show was touted as a boozy, A-list party, whose hosts often took a more irreverent tone than their academy counterparts. It also only honored the flashiest filmmaking categories — picture, director, actors among them — meaning no long speeches from visual effects supervisors or directors of shorts no one has heard of.
But the voting body was a small group of around 87 members who wielded incredible influence in the industry and often accepted lavish gifts and travel from studios and awards publicists eager to court favor and win votes.
Some years, the HFPA were pilloried for nominating poorly reviewed films with big name talent with hopes of getting them to the show, the most infamous being “The Tourist,” with Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp. In the past decade, they’ve more often overlapped with the Oscars. The show also recognizes television.
Before the expose and public relations crisis though, no one in the industry took much umbrage with who was voting on the awards. The show had become an important part of the Hollywood awards ecosystem, a platform for Oscar hopefuls and was, until recently, a reliable ratings draw. As of 2019, it was still pulling in nearly 19 million viewers to the broadcast. This year, NBC’s Tuesday night broadcast got its smallest audience ever, with 6.3 million viewers.
