This year’s Golden Globes mostly got it right. But what about Wicked?

Australia came away empty-handed, Emilia Pérez was the surprise hit, and Wicked, the biggest film of the year, failed to cast a strong spell over this year’s Golden Globes. Nobody honestly thought it would defy gravity, but that it came up so short was still a shock.

Wicked’s Ariana Grande on the Golden Globes red carpet.Credit: AP

The 82nd annual Golden Globes got it mostly right with wins for Jean Smart, Demi Moore, Kieran Culkin and Hiroyuki Sanada. Nicole Kidman should have won for Babygirl, but against Pamela Anderson (The Last Showgirl) and Angelina Jolie (Maria), she was in what everyone assumed was the night’s toughest category. (Fernanda Torres won.)

But first, what happened to Wicked? The biggest movie musical in recent memory went in with four nominations: motion picture musical or comedy, female actor (for Cynthia Erivo), supporting female actor (for Ariana Grande) and cinematic and box office achievement, which recognises – as the title suggests – the fact that a film made an enormous amount of money.

In the end, Wicked walked away with only the last of the four, a largely industry-facing award intended to soothe the bruised ego of blockbusters which lose out to critical darlings at events like the Golden Globes. Erivo lost to Demi Moore. Grande lost to Zoe Saldaña. And Wicked itself lost to Emilia Pérez.

What makes it a more complex equation is the fact that the night’s big winners were genuinely deserving: the brilliant Jean Smart for Hacks, director Brady Corbet for Oscar best picture contender The Brutalist, the astoundingly good Kieran Culkin for A Real Pain and Sebastian Stan, who delivered an extraordinary performance in A Different Man.

Golden Globe winner Jean Smart.Credit: Getty Images

It is a sign, perhaps, that the fatter voting body for the awards (300-plus voters, up from fewer than 90 a few years ago) is now returning a result more reflective, in the movie categories at least, of the Academy Award winners the night is intended to predict.

Jean Smart’s win seemed acutely resonant. “I never thought I’d be so happy to be called a hack,” the Hacks star said. Smart, 73, is the poster girl for one of Hollywood’s most poorly treated demographics. To see the audience applaud her excellence was one of the great pleasures of the night.

It was also a night to celebrate “the best of film and to hold space for television”, said host Nikki Glaser, in a joke which was not intended to turn an uncomfortable spotlight on the fact that most of the TV winners – Hacks, The Bear, Shōgun – were on the tail end of longer winning streaks, but did.

The toughest categories, especially the three-way best female actor clash between Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman and Pamela Anderson, were over in film. Even there, all three of them eventually lost to Fernanda Torres (I’m Still Here) in a shock upset that will doubtless be felt all the way to the Oscars.

Glaser, too, was an odd choice for host: a stand-up comedian with a relatively low international profile, fronting the one awards night in awards season sold largely off the back of its internationality. For Australian viewers, in a telecast where Emilia Pérez director Jacques Audiard made his acceptance speeches in French, Glaser seemed unexpectedly and, at times, acutely American.

She also played it too safe with punchlines like P. Diddy, plastic surgery, Ozempic and “holding space” with Wicked: these are the dead fish of Hollywood’s humour barrel. Any comparison to Ricky Gervais, who hosted in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2016, and 2020, and offered zingers like “Get drunk, take your drugs, f--- off”, leaves Glaser looking like a hired hand at a corporate sponsor night.

Nicole Kidman was nominated for Babygirl.Credit: AP

As for the Globes themselves, the telecast was a lavish acknowledgement that the turbulence of the past few years is firmly in the rearview mirror. In 2021, Tom Cruise handed back his three Golden Globes amid an industry boycott, and the awards were bought and repackaged by Penske Media after being shelved in 2022.

Flash forward to 2025 and the compliments were coming thick and fast after Zoe Saldaña opened the show with a speech that sounded more like a humanitarian address to Golden Globés Sans Frontières. Unsurprisingly for Hollywood, the difference between a long, unironic leap and an extraordinary stretch is sometimes no distance at all. (No word on whether Cruise has asked for his statues back.)

From a technical standpoint, too, there were self-evident tweaks intended to sharpen up an ageing genre (“awards nights”) for a younger-skewing audience. With presenters coming on stage accompanied by “info nuggets” in the style of the VH1 TV series Pop-Up Video, and then facing the television cameras with their backs to the audience, this was less Globes and more Glik Glok.

Proof, too, perhaps, that these kinds of telecasts aren’t really about the people sitting the room – no matter how much the army of personal publicists believes they are – and are, in fact, all about the TV audience watching on channels which have shelled out large sums of money for the rights.

Who was it who said, “No one cares about movies any more; no one goes to cinema, no one really watches network TV”? Oh, that’s right. It was Ricky Gervais. At the Golden Globes.

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