For the past three years, the Golden Globes have been pretty near unmissable – and better than the Oscars – due to the hosting of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. This year, as previously, their opening monologue – plus the traditional A-lister TV cutaways – was a treat. I loved Amy Poehler’s impression of Brit actors doing an American accent in a pedantic, emphatic bass growl, the announcement that Wes Anderson arrived at the ceremony “on a bicycle made of antique tuba parts” and the fact that Boyhood “proves that there are still good roles for women over 40, as long as you get hired when you are under 40”.
Sadly, this is Tina and Amy’s final year in the job and a mini-era is over – unless they get hired for the Academy Awards, although I fear their act might be lost in that gigantic auditorium.
There were some pleasing results in the Globes list, although it perhaps bears saying that this year’s Bafta pain over the omissions of Mr Turner and Selma was rather repeated. Mr Turner had in fact already failed to make an impression with the Globes nominations, but I was half-expecting a great night for Selma, the civil rights drama starring the British actor David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King. But it was not to be.
The big winner was Boyhood, which picked up best drama, best director for Richard Linklater and best supporting actress for Patricia Arquette – it is a Globes quirk that the director and supporting actors categories are not subdivided into drama and comedy/musical.
It is particularly pleasing that Arquette got a prize as her contribution is so important and she has that sublimely sad farewell speech to her son, played by Ellar Coltrane, as he lopes off to college. This wonderful film has, for my money, deserved the silverware it’s been getting, but I would still at this stage be chary of declaring it has locked up the Oscars. Not necessarily.
The Globes, decided upon (somewhat opaquely) by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, are in some ways close to being a critics’ award — and Boyhood is more of a critics’ movie than most. Academy Awards voters may very well feel differently about it. But never mind: it is a superb film, possessed of the kind of inspired simplicity that is very difficult to achieve, and is genuinely “indie” in its soul — perhaps the most indie movie to have had major awards success in living memory.
The Grand Budapest Hotel, from that tuba-bicycle-riding director Wes Anderson, also did very well, winning best picture in the comedy/musical category. Inspired partly, but only partly, by Ernst Lubitsch, it is distinctive and singular in a way that usually seems to lose Wes Anderson as many friends as he gains. But it’s technically brilliant and very funny, and has now got the plaudits that it deserves. I’m hoping that that its awards success on both sides of the Atlantic could lead to an cinema re-release, although it did run for a remarkably long time here in the UK.
The big British success was Eddie Redmayne, winning best actor (drama) for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, beating out a very strong nominee list: Benedict Cumberbatch, Steve Carell, Jake Gyllenhaal and David Oyelowo. There will always be cynicism about the Tinseltown attitude towards fictional disability (something that is traditionally admired as long as it comes as a package with genius), but this is a genuinely excellent performance from Redmayne, and the movie itself is far more complex and demanding than you might expect.
Best actress (drama) went to Julianne Moore, for her performance in Still Alice, about a linguistics professor diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. This is another challenging role, and a uniquely disquieting subject. It recalls Joanne Woodward’s performance as a dementia sufferer, again a poet and college professor, in the 1985 TV movie Do You Remember Love. Moore was also nominated for best actress (musical/comedy) her role in David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars.
Alejandro González Iñárittu’s Birdman, his crazy comedy-fantasia about the former superhero movie actor trying for legit credibility on Broadway, picked up well-deserved awards for its lead actor Michael Keaton and for its screenplay by Iñárritu, and collaborators Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, and Armando Bo. Keaton was great in the role, although for me, Birdman’s glories were more widespread and weren’t really all about his central performance. Certainly, the movie was much funnier and zingier than I would have suspected from Iñárittu’s previously rather solemn work — and the screenplay was terrific.
Amy Adams gave a performance of vulnerability and charm in Tim Burton’s Big Eyes and no one would begrudge her her Golden Globe, although Brits may have been hoping that it would go to Emily Blunt for her singing role in the Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods – one of the things that made that rather stately cultural artefact bearable. (One of the evening’s not-very-guilty pleasures was Amy Poehler’s gleefully improvising what a Sondheim melody sounds like to the unbeliever.)
Finally, there is Whiplash, that bizarre story of a musical instructor terrorising a young student of jazz drumming. JK Simmons got his well-deserved best supporting actor as the bullet-headed sadist. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Simmons pick up an Oscar as well. Whiplash was a film that I thoroughly enjoyed – though without really believing in it for a moment.
So these Globes seem to put Boyhood in pole position for awards season glory – or perhaps its prize euphoria peaks here, leaving The Theory of Everything or Whiplash or Selma or Birdman or The Imitation Game to jink through for the Oscars. It’s still an open field.
• 12 things we learned
• As it happened
• Full list of winners
• Social media wins
• Winners in pictures
• Best quotes
• This article was amended on 12 January 2015. The original referred to “David Oyewolo” and stated that Julianne Moore was nominated in a supporting category. This has been corrected.
