Hollywood pulled its collective weight for Warner Bros. at the Golden Globes on Sunday, handing the company a slew of top prizes in both film and television. But even as the show rained awards on the legacy studio, a notably anxious air hung over the proceedings as the company’s ownership and creative fate sits mired in uncertainty.
“There’s a name you’re hearing a lot tonight,” One Battle After Another writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson said, nodding to WB co-chief Mike De Luca as Anderson accepted the best director prize. “The reason why is because he’s behind a lot of these movies.” Anderson said he met the executive decades ago, with De Luca telling him he would one day run a studio and “let directors do whatever the hell they want.”
It was far from the only statuette the studio won. The faded-revolutionary crowdpleaser One Battle dominated the show, also winning the top prize of best film musical or comedy, best original screenplay and best supporting actress; Ryan Coogler’s vampire race-allegory Sinners landed the prize for best cinematic and box office achievement, given to the most beloved of the year’s blockbusters; and Warner Bros. Television’s real-time medical drama The Pitt, a major hit for HBO Max in its debut season, won best TV series drama. Creator R. Scott Gemmill saluted WBTV execs Channing Dungey and Clancy Collins White as he stood in front of John Wells and Noah Wyle — Pitt executive producers also heavily associated with iconic WB hit ER — further highlighting the studio’s long tradition of populist award winners.
If there was a movie that crashed the WB party, it was Focus Features’ literary tearjerker Hamnet, which beat Sinners for best picture drama. “Let’s keep seeing each other and let’s keep allowing ourselves to be seen,” director Chloe Zhao said upon accepting the prize, after being introduced by producer Steven Spielberg, and highlighting a theme of unity that recurred throughout the show. Star Jessie Buckley also won best actress in a drama.
But the narrative often snaked back to WB, with the ceremony taking place amid Netflix and Paramount’s epic fight over ownership of the company. The former bidder has worried Hollywood given its aversion to theaters; the latter has concerned those anxious about owner David Ellison’s seeming capitulations to President Donald Trump. And everyone is fretting about the fate of De Luca and his co-chief Pam Abdy (or at least what they represent), who have emerged as original-storytelling heroes staring down the wolves of techno-Wall Street.
Sinners director Ryan Coogler seemed to be taking aim at Netflix as he thanked the current brass of WB and their strategy. “It was an honor on this movie to know that it was getting a theatrical release,” he said upon receiving the box office achievement prize. And Battle’s Teyana Taylor, taking the prize for supporting actress in a film, also gave WB their props as she also spent a portion of her speech saluting fellow women of color.
Even non-WB personalities got in on the Netflix-skeptical action. Stellan Skarsgard, who won best supporting actor in a film for his role as a complicated father in Norwegian film Sentimental Value, appeared to take aim at streaming when he said dryly of his film, “Hopefully you’ll see it in a cinema because they’re an extinguished species now.”
Meanwhile, host Nikki Glaser put one in the anti-Ellison column when she took a shot at the network on whose air she was appearing. “The award for most editing goes to CBS News. ‘CBS news, America’s newest place to ‘see BS’ news,’” she deadpanned, referencing a 60 Minutes editing controversy. She, too, then turned her attention to the sale, saying WB was saved by Sinners … for “a month.”
It was not the only moment producers and presenters at the Golden Globes seemed to be clinging wistfully to better times. A slew of veteran actors including Wyle, Skarsgard and Jean Smart all took prizes at the 83rd annual show while the telecast hunkering down in nostalgia with presentations from, and frequent bits about, George Clooney and Julia Roberts — almost seeking to will a less politically and technologically charged era back into being. Clooney noted that he “saw a lot of old friends here.” He didn’t say any of them were Hollywood itself, but few would have been surprised if he did. (His own contending movie Jay Kelly — ironically put out by Netflix — carries its own rueful love for a star system quickly fading.)
And the biggest TV comedy winner of the night, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s The Studio — it won best TV comedy while Rogen won for best actor in a TV comedy — itself represents a kind of pure-minded art holding its own against a business’ changing ways. Rogen’s Matt Remick doesn’t always win those battles, but there’s inspiration in the fighting.
Still, the veteran actors were sometimes just happy to celebrate their triumphs and long roads to the podium. “I of course was not prepared for this because I thought that I was too old,” quipped Skarsgard. The 74-year-old has been acting for some 55 years but has never been nominated for an Oscar; he previously won a Globe on the TV side, for Chernobyl in 2020.
Smart, winning her third actress in a television show prize for her role of Deborah Vance in Hacks, began with, “What can I say, I’m a greedy bitch.” Wyle, who won lead actor in a TV drama for his empathetic portrayal as a doctor leading an ER in The Pitt, described his attempt to thank everyone over 54 years of living on this planet.
Adolescence’s Stephen Graham and Dying for Sex’s Michelle Williams, who’ve been acting a combined total of 66 years, won actor and actress in a limited series or TV movie (his first, her third). Pluribus’ Rhea Seehorn, at 53 with her own quarter-century of acting behind her, won her first Golden Globe when she took the prize for best actress in a drama, and she seemed both genuinely nervous and grateful as she thanked the show’s creator Vince Gilligan.
And while at 30 he’s hardly ready for AARP membership, Timothee Chalamet finally won a Golden Globe on his fifth try for his turn as the fast-talking top-spinning title character in Marty Supreme. “My dad instilled in me a spirit of gratitude growing up,” he said, which is what made him happy leaving the Beverly Hilton even all those times he didn’t win. But that did, he concede, making this time “sweeter.”
Newer names also had their moment, as Owen Cooper won for best supporting actor in a TV role for his turn as a troubled teen in Adolescence. And KPop Demon Hunters continued its phenom status as the Netflix animated musical took best original song and best animated movie. Maggie Kang, one of the film’s two directors, said that felt so gratified that “a movie so steeped in Korean culture can resonate with a global audience.”
The Globes winners have also become more international with its voting body of hundreds around the world (as opposed to several dozen in Los Angeles). Exhibit A: Wagner Moura won best actor in a drama for his role in Brazilian thriller The Secret Agent, defeating Stateside A-listers like Dwayne Johnson and Michael B. Jordan. Moura called his movie “a film about memory, or the lack of memory, and generational trauma. I think if trauma can be passed along generations, values can too,” he said, and dedicated the award to “the ones sticking with values in difficult moments.”
The Globes also continued their recent trend for going small and indie in other ways, giving best actress in a musical or comedy to Rose Byrne for her role as a resolute therapist and mom in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. “This is a tiny film so it’s a huge thing to be up here,” Byrne said, then continued the quirkiness by citing a story she had been telling on the late-night circuit: that her partner Bobby Cannavale couldn’t be there because, well, “we’re getting a bearded dragon so he went to a reptile expo in New Jersey.” (It’s for their kids.)
Throughout the night, politics was less shouted about than dog-whistled. Glaser made one such call when, at the start of her return engagement after last year’s well-reviewed turn, she offered a pun about the “A-list” in the room as people on “a list” of the Justice Department. But mostly she stuck to safe Hollywood jokes about Timothée Chalamet’s weight, Kevin Hart’s height and Sean Penn’s face (though her Heated Rivalry quip that the gay drama shows that “American audiences are ready for more shows about … hockey” was its own much-needed provocation).
Smart also got political, if obliquely, when she urged viewers to “do the right thing” without elaborating on what that meant. And in presenting best director, Judd Apatow sneaked in the idea that we now “live in a dictatorship” without getting into any details.
In one of the most low-key touching turns of the night, Glaser ended the show wearing a Spinal Tap hat and noting the show went to eleven, in reference to the late great Rob Reiner. In one of the more perplexing and shocking turns of the night, not a single other person on the stage mentioned the master of heart and comedy despite paying frequent lip service to both concepts.
But it was Gemmill who perhaps had the most heartwarming comment of the night when, accepting the best TV drama prize, he said — wistfully — that Hollywood can set an example of unity with its hundreds of actors, writers, craftspeople and crew members pulling in the same direction to create entertainment. “We live in a very divided country and world,” he said. “But I think cinema brings us all together, not only as an audience but as a community.”
Golden Globes producer Dick Clark Productions is owned by Penske Media Eldridge, a joint venture between Penske Media Corporation and Eldridge that also owns The Hollywood Reporter.