The "Globes", as the Golden Globe Awards are affectionately known in the USA, are more relaxed than the Oscars: there is mugging, laughing, and the jokes on stage are a little nastier - especially when there, like in again this year, the British comedian Ricky Gervais pulls off his show as a presenter.
Nobody takes the award ceremony really seriously. And not for full either - the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which it organizes and consists of 93 members, is much too small for that. The decisions of the international journalists organized in the HFPA have often caused head shakes in recent years. Again, because hardly any women were nominated, although Greta Gerwig ("Little Women") and Lulu Wang ("The Farewell") were two directors.
The Golden Globe Awards are by no means good as a supposedly sure whistleblower for the later Oscar winners. It was a coincidence that last year "Green Book" won the best comedy / musical at the Globes and the best film at the Oscars, the match rate was a maximum of 50 percent.
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Golden Globes 2020: The pictures of the red carpetIt is very questionable whether the winner of the evening of the 2020 edition, the war film "1917", will also win big at the Oscars. Taron Egerton, who was named best actor in a comedy / musical for his role of Elton John in "Rocketman", will also go home with an Oscar, which is even less likely.
With such surprise candidates, the stock conservative HFPA at least produces headlines when it comes to questions of artistic taste. This year she succeeds even more with a candidate she did not honor - namely a group that was previously the big winner of the evening: Netflix.
The California film and series factory was nominated 34 times, with "The Irishman", "Marriage Story" and "The Two Popes" three times in the category Best Film. In the end, Netflix went home with two measly prizes: Laura Dern was named best supporting actress for "Marriage Story", Olivia Colman for "The Crown" as best leading actress in a drama series.
"Sorry, Netflix," the actor Jared Harris threw at the group from the stage, while Sam Mendes, who was also awarded the "Best Director" title for "1917", campaigned for the cinema experience: "I really hope that this award will do that people go out and watch the film on the big screen it was made for. " He didn't even have to mention the name Netflix in this context, because verbal elbow checks were also heard that way.
In fact, the Golden Globes 2020 positioned themselves as defenders of classic Hollywood cinema against the upstart of streaming services. "1917" advertises with its technical finesse, which make the film appear as a single, uninterrupted tracking shot - a cinematic effort, with which Alfred Hitchcock experimented as early as 1948 ("Cocktail for a corpse") and which is often the spectacular and intoxicating element emphasizes that the cinema experience is attributed.
And "Once Upon A Time in Hollywood" by Quentin Tarantino won a film in the Comedy / Musical category that is neither musical nor comedy, but a sad look back at Hollywood in the 1960s, when television was still television and so on Film studios are not only artistically more valuable, but also comparatively more powerful.
What distinguishes the media presence of the young year 2020, however, is precisely the dissolution of these categories, which were carved in stone for decades. Netflix does both television and cinema, only that the group produces its films for the screen at home and only brings them pro forma for a short time to a few cinemas.
The future has already started
How much the categories have survived is shown by Martin Scorsese's epic "The Irishman", which went away empty-handed at Globes: a well over 100 million dollar mafia thriller by a living cinema legend with the cinema legends Robert de Niro and Starring Joe Pesci. If only a few years ago this film had not been treated as a big cinema event, which one? Today "The Irishman" is a television film that also ran in cinemas for a few weeks so that he could attend the Oscar ceremony.
Netflix is attacking a business model that worked for over a hundred years. At the same time, the group is still partially dependent on the structures of the old entertainment world, especially on great prices and the associated glamor. Prices and prestige should attract new customers and keep old ones, they should lift some works from the self-produced mass, in a spotlight that was previously reserved for cinema productions.
Now the group stands there doubly, not a few in the industry will smile at the sensitive defeat. Of course it is too early for that, the evening of the Oscar ceremony will be really important for Netflix. And the fact is that there would be no films like "The Irishman" or "Marriage Story" without the streamer. Precisely because the market has changed, because film studios shy away from creative and financial risk, because Disney dominates the screens of the multiplexes with its comic, animation and family films.
A look at the TV division, which is also recognized at the Golden Globes, shows how much times have changed. There, too, Netflix lost a lot, especially against HBO with its four awards. But only pay channels and streaming services were among the nominees this year. Not a single classic cable transmitter was among them.
Even if no one knows what it will look like in concrete terms: the entertainment world of the future has already begun.
