Golden Globes 2023: The Golden Globes did its usual ‘naatu’

The Golden Globe winning 'Naatu Naatu' song from SS Rajamouli's 'RRR'.

For the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) and the Golden Globe Awards, this year’s ceremony was going to be either a salve or a nuker. In the past two years, the Awards have been mired in accusations of being insular (for several decades, it had only one member of colour among its 87 members). The Los Angeles Times did two ground-shifting exposés on the HFPA, and accused it of “ethical lapses” in functioning. A lawsuit by a Norwegian journalist accused them of a “culture of corruption”.

Predictably, it was going to about winning Hollywood back. After all, Tom Cruise, the ascendant Hollywood mogul after Top Gun: Maverick (a nominee for Best picture at this year’s awards) went bonkers at box offices worldwide, boycotted it and also returned his past Globes. And so be it, the hustle to please. The Best Picture and Best Director went to The Fableman and Steven Spielberg; the Best Actor in a drama to Austin Butler for his eponymous role in Baz Luhrman’s Elvis. Not that The Fablemans is a bad film (the film is yet to release in Indian theatres) or that at 76, Spielberg isn’t at his best form as director. Butler, of course, as a majority of critics and movie lovers the world over have agreed, was only ordinarily immersive in the role of a character that’s synonymous with American pop culture in a movie that sanitised every aspect of the Elvis Presley trajectory. The Fabelmans is a semi-autobiographical film about a boy’s journey through the love of cinema as his family splinters — according to several critics, a twee look at the birth of Spielberg’s genius and an antiseptic brush over any ugliness that could have beset his family and his growing up years. The last time he got the Globe, it was in 1999 for Saving Private Ryan, and by awarding The Fablemans, the HFPA seems to have justified why it exists in the first place: love and war for the movies. Quentin Tarantino awarded Best Picture to Spielberg; he whispered to the big man’s ear that John Cassavetes would be happy. Sweet, although Tarantino wasn’t his usual awkwardly jokey self. It remains to be seen whether even the Academy Awards will decide to dismiss the audacious imagination and arduous effort that James Cameron put into making Avatar: The Ways of Water, awakening a sensory culture across the world about what cinema can do to our senses. Remarkable achievement, but Spielberg’s own ode to his cinema education got the award over Avatar.

The brilliant comedian Jerrod Carmichael was the host — the first ever solo Black host in the show’s history. Carmichael’s jokes weren’t tumescent or crackling really, proving he isn’t great at being emcee or he was indifferent from the word go.

So, did the tide turn somehow for the HFPA and the Golden Globes?

Not really. In keeping with the philosophy it started with, to honour film-making talent not necessarily aligned to commercial success at the box office, Avatar: The Way of Water, Top Gun: Maverick or, in the non-English category, SS Rajamouli’s blockbuster RRR did not win. The Best Original Song award for RRR’s Naatu Naatu (composed by MM Keeravani) is a culmination of the momentum RRR has been picking up among lobbyists for both the Globes and the Academy Awards as resurgent, fun, grand-scale Bollywood with obsessive attention to form rather than meaning or substance — it’s a known fact among Gen Z university students in the US, RRR is a bonafide cult hit; and Naatu Naatu a party favourite. This win finally puts the spotlight on the power of the Indian film song — that’s another piece for another time. RRR lost to the worthy winner in the non-English category, Argentina,1985, a relevant, potently political and powerful film about a team of lawyers that tried to topple the military dictatorship in Argentina in the 1980s.

The two wonderfully surprises among the top winners are Best Musical or Comedy Motion Picture and Best Screenplay for Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, a beautifully sparse film set in rural Ireland (available to stream on Amazon Prime) about male friendship and the “bleakness and grudges and loneliness and spite” that could accompany it, in the words of one of its characters. McDonagh’s screenplay is a voice of modern, post-pandemic exasperation. The White Lotus: Sicily got Best TV Miniseries and Jennifer Coolidge got Best Supporting Actress for her role in The White Lotus: Sicily — a recognition of the power of the absurd-comic in storytelling and of nuanced, smart characterisation.

The changes in the HFPA will continue; the future of the Awards could look even more different. It’s worth noting that in 2021, soon after the controversies broke the internet, the HFPA appointed its member Todd Boehly, chairman of Elridge Industries, as its interim CEO. Boehly owns stakes in influential trade publications Variety and the Hollywood Reporter as well as film distributor A24, whose titles have accrued 10 nominations this year. Recent new reports say Boehly is buying the Golden Globes and transforming the organisation from not-for-profit to a for-profit.

There’s going to be more diversity-thumping and more Hollywood love on display as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces this year’s nominees on 23 January. Hopefully, there will be more surprises and something more for making the blue people happen.