The Golden Globes Are Cancelled

It's been a few days, and the aftershocks are still being felt from the cancellation of the 2022 Golden Globes.  Many things are still unclear.  Will the Globes be back?  Will they be replaced with another awards ceremony like the SAG Awards or the Critics' Choice Awards?  What about the Hollywood Foreign Press Association?  They'll have to change or perish, but are they worth saving at this point?

So, let's start from the top.  The Golden Globes don't mean anything, but in the Hollywood marketing ecosystem they are important.  Way back in the 1960s, after losing the rights to broadcast the Academy Awards, NBC decided that they needed their own awards show, and began broadcasting the Golden Globes intermittently.  It didn't have technical categories, honored both film and television, and was generally a looser, and notoriously boozier affair.  The Hollywood Foreign Press Association that gives the awards out (hereafter the HFPA) is a group of eighty-odd foreign entertainment journalists with no transparency and a long history of shady dealing, but they put on a good show so nobody cared.  In the '90s, because the NBC broadcasts became a long-term commitment and the Globes got national attention, they gradually became an important part of the Oscar season, and sometimes a key part of the marketing for prestige films.  And it's no secret that the HFPA could be bought.  

I won't go into all the highly suspect Golden Globe nominations that have happened over the years, but everyone in Hollywood spent an awful lot of money over the years currying the favor of the HFPA, and the HFPA shamelessly took advantage.  This is far from the first time their members have been called out for bad behavior, and there's been a lot of resentment building up.  Frankly, as the ratings of the various award shows have been declining, the writing's been on the wall that the situation with the Golden Globes is untenable.  Remember, in Hollywood the optics are everything, and as long as the Golden Globes maintained the comfortable fiction that they were a legitimate organization that carried out their awards process in a fair and impartial way, everyone else was more or less inclined to play ball with them.  However, after the Los Angeles Times expose in February and the clumsy response of the HFPA, this became harder and harder, and finally the dam broke.

The straw that finally broke the camel's back was probably former HFPA president Phil Berk sending out an anti-BLM rant via E-mail in late April, plus the Times Up coalition calling out the weaknesses of the HFPA's proposed diversity and inclusion reforms.  Looking at how events played out, with a long list of PR firms, A-list movie stars, Netflix and Amazon, and multiple fixers washing their hands of the HFPA, it's pretty clear that everyone in town was just plain fed up with them.  The few distressed rebuttals that have emerged from HFPA members, pointing out that the deficiencies of the organization have been common knowledge for years, are amazingly tone deaf.  They don't seem to have noticed that the Hollywood status quo changed after Me Too and Times Up.  Then again, after decades of enjoying way too much unearned status and influence in Hollywood, why would we expect them to?    

I've heard some interesting proposals about how to fix the situation, like having the HFPA absorbed into a larger critics' or journalistic organization that could take over the awards, or maybe that the current leadership just needs to be flushed out, but at this point drastic action is needed.  However, I wouldn't count the Globes out just yet.  This isn't the first time NBC has dumped the Golden Globes or the first time the HFPA has been in hot water.  And even if nobody takes the Golden Globes seriously, we all know what the Globes are - and that's not true of the Independent Spirit Awards, the AFI awards, or the majority of the other alternatives.  

So the HFPA gravy train as we know it is probably toast, but I have no doubt that the Globes will be back in a year or two.  They might not be on NBC, and they might not be as high profile, but they'll be back.     

---