This Stuff Had Better Win Golden Globes Or I Will Riot

We all remember where we were, over a year ago, when it was decided that the 2022 Golden Globes Awards would not be televised thanks to some apparent racial exclusion and corruption. I myself was… well, I don’t remember. 

But don’t worry: the Hollywood Foreign Press Association sorted it all out, so we’re good to go! 

But who will win? More importantly, who should win?

I don’t mean “should” in a cute, ‘let’s casually gab about pop culture’ kind of way. I mean “should” as in it’s wrong if something else wins. Awards are serious business. I wish I was joking.

The Movies

Tár, which I did not see, will win Best Motion Picture, Drama. But Top Gun: Maverick should win. No one on the planet cares more about entertaining people than Tom Cruise, who wasn’t nominated as a performer (possibly because he sent back all of his Golden Globes when the HFPA got into hot water). He acts like the fate of cinema depends on how exhilarating he can make a movie, each of which may very well be his last. 

The first Avatar won this award in 2010 but the world has changed a lot since then and James Cameron can’t just put us in front of a digital fishbowl for seven hours (half of which is reused footage from Titanic), call it Avatar 2, and pick up a prize. 

Then there’s The Elvis Question. This movie was absolutely bonkers but I loved it. Tom Hanks is in a fat suit (usually a disqualifier) and I couldn’t understand a word of what he was saying. Was he playing Elvis’s accountant? His landlord? Was it a buddy cop movie? Literally no one knows. But I got swept away by the great music.

The Fablemans looks like it’s right up my alley. But I didn’t see it. That said, Steven Spielberg should win the award for directing it. But also, maybe Baz Luhrmann? 

The Actors

Cate Blanchett will win Best Performance By An Actress In A Motion Picture, Drama for Tár because it feels like the kind of thing that would happen. But Amber Midthunder should win for her action-packed, unnominated performance in Prey, in which the Predator makes the mistake of attacking the Comanche Nation hundreds of years ago.

Brendan Fraser will win Best Performance By An Actor In A Motion Picture, Drama for portrayal of a very large man who wants to repair the relationship with his teenage daughter in The Whale. 

Fraser seems like a nice person. And it’s terrible that he was allegedly sexually assaulted in 2003 by the former HFPA president (who denied it, then eventually lost his job after he called Black Lives Matter a “racist hate movement”).

I certainly don’t blame him for not wanting to show up after how the situation was handled. But he is wearing a digitally enhanced fat suit in that movie and I just won’t stand for it. Austin Butler should win, especially because of the way he shepherds us through that wild Elvis ride.

As for Best Motion Picture, Musical Or Comedy (how does anyone say these categories with a straight face?), it looks like there’s a kind of consensus around Everything Everywhere All At Once. It will win and I really wish I’d seen it. It’s just been such a busy year, so much uncertainty. I mean, is the pandemic over or isn’t it? The stock market is up, then it’s down. I’m lucky that I saw the movies I did, to be honest.

There also appears to be some enthusiasm for The Banshees of Inisherin, which should not win because the director Martin McDonagh’s last movie Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was deeply patronising and tone-deaf and misguided. Which would have been fine but then it won all those awards and I took it very personally. By my emotional calculation, it will take at least three more really good McDonagh movies to wash away the memory of that unpleasantness. 

I really liked Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and Triangle of Sadness a lot, but Barbarian should win. The ‘Airbnb gone wrong’ horror movie (on its surface) is funny and scary and has great twists. And Justin Long should win for playing a hilarious jerk. But guess what? Not nominated. Rude.

Best Motion Picture, Animated. They should have called this category Best Motion Picture, Pinocchio. There were 35 Pinocchio movies last year. Some were directed by Guillermo del Toro while others were… not. One of them is sure to win. But Puss In Boots: The Last Wish should win because the Puss in Boots movies are always fun and funny.

I’m yet to catch any of the Best Motion Picture, Foreign Language nominees but Park Chan-wook makes good movies so Decision to Leave should win. 

No one will win anything in the screenplay category because the show will be called off after Pinocchio inevitably slaps someone in the face. 

If anyone wins anything for music, it should be Taylor Swift. ‘Carolina’ is easily the Best Original Song. I didn’t feel a thing watching Where the Crawdads Sing until it played at the end. Then it became the best movie I’d ever seen. Swift should win and she will win. The universe (me, I am the universe) won’t stand for anything less.

The TV Shows

I read that there were just over three thousand TV shows last year. Thankfully, it appears that the HFPA has only seen a small handful of them. So if you liked The Crown and The Bear and Only Murders in the Building, you’re in luck.

But you should be praying that Better Call Saul wins Best Drama because that is what its sixth season was. It will win and it should win. Same goes for its star, Bob Odenkirk.

As for Severance, I have thoughts: These people are making some very permanent decisions about how they’re going to spend half their lives. They don’t have a contingency plan? An abort button? 

No one else will win in the rest of the TV drama categories. They will be removed to make more room for the DJ who leads us into, then brings us back from, commercial breaks.

Best Television Series – Musical or Comedy. What are we doing here? Why are musicals and comedies together? I don’t get it. Also, The Bear is not a comedy. There isn’t a single laugh in it. 

The unnominated second season of The Great or season four of What We Do In The Shadows should win. They were both very funny. Funnier than The Bear, obviously.

Jean Smart will win TV Comedy Actress for Hacks. Jeremy Allen White will win for The Bear. Donald Glover is great, but no one was funnier than Matt Berry on WWDITS. He should win, despite not being nominated. And what about Nathan Fielder in The Rehearsal? Have you ever seen someone try to convince a child that he’s not his daddy… in a documentary? No. You haven’t.

As for Best Television Limited Series, Anthology Series Or Motion Picture Made For Television, Pam and Tommy and Black Bird are fun, but The White Lotus: Sicily will win. It’s the only show people talk about and it’s really entertaining. 

But I liked the first season more so The Dropout should win for what it says about the world we’ve made for ourselves with all these tech people behaving terribly and making the internet more irritating than ever. And Amanda Seyfried should win for her performance as Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. She’s terrifying.

F. Murray Abraham will win the Supporting Actor award as the horny grandpa in The White Lotus. He’s good, but Black Bird’s Paul Walter Hauser is perhaps the best actor of his generation. All of his performances are iconic and memorable and weird.

Jennifer Coolidge is going to win again for The White Lotus. And she probably deserves it given how Tanya goes out — the “say hello to my little friend”-style shoot out, the “you got this” before stumbling off the yacht… gold. I really liked Aubrey Plaza too, but Jennifer should probably win.

Now, we’ve all had a lot of fun here. Should I have seen more movies? Of course. Did I intentionally skip some categories? Maybe. Should we resist the temptation to take this stuff too seriously? No.

If the Golden Globes diverge from any of my shoulds, it will anger and disrupt our collective sense of righteousness. Disagreement can not and will not be countenanced. There is no escape from this cyclone of moral panic. There never has been.

See you on the red carpet.

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Nick Bhasin is a writer in Sydney. His debut novel, ‘I Look Forward to Hearing from You’, will be published by Penguin Random House Australia in June 2023. Follow him on Twitter before it becomes completely unsafe.