In the end, these Globes surprised us, uncontroversially rewarding obvious quality in some categories but passing over other huge achievements like Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light or Timothée Chalamet’s performance as Bob Dylan. (And entirely ignoring RaMell Ross’s masterly Nickel Boys still hurts.)
The megamusical Wicked, which had been winning hearts and minds and various levels of grudging and ungrudging acceptance (including from your correspondent) did not walk off with the award for best musical or comedy as we all expected, instead sent away with the Globe for “cinematic achievement”, the rather strange award instituted to acknowledge box office whoppers (including those in the now dowdy superhero genre) which otherwise get critical noses turned up at them, and for which the box office numbers themselves are surely the only meaningful arbiter.
Otherwise, the best musical/comedy Globe, along with the Globes for best non-English-language, best supporting female actor (Zoe Saldana) and best original song went to Jacques Audiard’s strange and soap-operatic confection Emilia Pérez, a Mexican crime musical about a trans cartel mobster which is brilliant and preposterous in proportions of about 1:2, and which has, however, been received with absolute seriousness in some quarters. An award for musical-slash-comedy is a fitting prize in many ways.
In the end, its formidable performer nominee, trans actor Karla Sofia Gascon, did not win the Globe for best female actor (comedy/musical), which went instead to Demi Moore for her storming comeback in Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror satire The Substance as the anguished movie star and TV workout queen in career crisis who takes an underground drug which will create a younger self.
In the Globes’ “serious” side, Brady Corbet’s magnificent and gauntly mysterious, quasi-Randian epic The Brutalist dominated the night – a movie about a fictional Hungarian holocaust survivor and architect who comes to the United States and gets taken up by a capricious plutocrat. It won best film (drama), best director for Corbet and best actor for Adrien Brody – eerily echoing his glittering prizes for playing the lead in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist over 20 years ago.
Demi Moore with her award. Photograph: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
It could well be that The Brutalist will be this year’s Oppenheimer, a meaty super-serious film that awards voters can feel comfortable about endorsing – but I think a richer, more complex and more challenging film than Oppenheimer, and one with the most extraordinary twist-reveal ending which doesn’t feel like a gimmick. It’s a film of Wellesian vigour and dash.
The other big surprise of the evening was the Globe for best female actor in a drama going to the Brazilian star Fernanda Torres for her resounding and heartfelt performance in Walter Salles’s real-life political family drama I’m Still Here, about the activist Eunice Paiva dealing with the disappearance of her husband Rubens during Brazil’s military dictatorship of the 1970s. Torres beat out a list of big-hitters to get this award, including Tilda Swinton, Kate Winslet, Nicole Kidman, Pamela Anderson and Angelina Jolie. It was a wonderful night for Torres.
Elsewhere, the male actor in a musical or comedy was another surprise: Sebastian Stan won it for A Different Man, Aaron Schimberg’s doppelganger parable co-starring the un-nominated Adam Pearson. Stan beat out our own Hugh Grant, whose hilarious performance in Heretic was for me superior, and in fact I thought Stan gave a more interesting performance as the young Donald Trump in The Apprentice, for which he had been nominated in the “drama” category.
Elsewhere, it was good to see Peter Straughan win the screenplay Globe for his sterling work on the massively entertaining drama Conclave – though sad not to see it get anything else, and I fear that Ralph Fiennes’s lead turn might get crowded out in the rest of the awards season. And it was richly satisfying to see Kieran Culkin win best supporting actor for his jittery, hyperactive, entirely characteristic and entirely brilliant performance as the impossible cousin in Jesse Eisenberg’s terrific A Real Pain.
In the end, this was Brady Corbet’s night for The Brutalist – and this is the serious blockbuster which now moves into pole position for the Baftas and the Academy Awards.
