It’s become traditional to look for the snubs in any award list – and heaven help anyone whose job it is to curate the “in memoriam” montage on the night and then the next morning apologise for the inevitable hurtful omissions.
Snubs have become a cliche of awards season commentary, but you have to wonder about the best director list of this year’s Golden Globes nominations. No Richard Linklater? This amazing director actually has two films in the “best musical or comedy” section (so I guess he can’t really be that depressed). There’s his amazingly witty and poignant chamber piece Blue Moon, with Globe-nominated Ethan Hawke playing depressed Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, and his eerily accomplished pastiche-homage Nouvelle Vague, about the making of Godard’s classic Breathless, shot not in the boring old colour in which these events happened but in a beautifully realised monochrome – a little reverential for my tastes but still a marvellously accomplished picture. Two films in one year, and such different films. Quite a feat.
Elsewhere, Sydney Sweeney has been overlooked for her performance as boxer Christy Martin – I’d have liked to see her nominated for playing the eponymous role in Paul Feig’s tongue-in-cheek, 90s-style erotic noir The Housemaid. Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite was great and unjustly overlooked. Nothing for Kelly Reichardt’s tremendous social-realist heist adventure The Mastermind (and nothing for its star, Josh O’Connor). Bradley Cooper’s standup comedy movie Is This Thing On? isn’t all that it might have been – but I would have liked to see Will Arnett get a nomination. And what about Emma Thompson in the excellent suspense thriller Dead of Winter, a film that has utterly vanished from this year’s awards season campaigning. Did I dream it?
Of course, the frontrunner is Paul Thomas Anderson with nine Globe nominations for his colossal countercultural satire caper One Battle After Another, inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland with Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob, the chaotically washed-up revolutionary and pothead who can’t remember his organisation’s secret telephone password, and Sean Penn as Lockjaw, the bullnecked military honcho dedicated to taking them down – but poignantly infatuated with Bob’s former partner, a charismatic badass played by Teyana Taylor. Lockjaw is in a symbolic paternity dispute with Bob over a teen played by Chase Infiniti – a battle for the soul of America’s youth.
The pure energy and excitement of Anderson’s film-making has captured the Globes’ voting constituency and there is something interesting in putting it in the “musical or comedy” section. Perhaps that is what it is – a comedy. Josh Safdie’s delirious ping-pong adventure Marty Supreme with Timothée Chalamet might yet surge up alongside it, however.
In the “best film – drama” list, my personal vote would be for Kleber Mendonça Filho’s stunning epic The Secret Agent with Wagner Moura as the scientist in 1970s Brazil on the run from the authorities (actually, a posthumous Globe supporting actor nomination for the late Udo Kier would have been nice). It’s like Antonioni’s The Passenger reimagined by Elmore Leonard.
Yet the Globe will probably go to Chloé Zhao’s tender and audacious Hamnet, offering the theory that Shakespeare’s Hamlet was inspired by the death of his son Hamnet, with a wonderful lead performance from Jessie Buckley as Anne Hathaway. But Ryan Coogler’s horror-thriller mashup Sinners with Globe-nominated star Michael B Jordan has a huge and growing following with seven nominations and this movie might well pinch it on the night. And Guillermo del Toro’s romantic gothic Frankenstein is, to use a cynical term, testing well with the voters.
Non-English-language movies are well represented at the Globes this year, and Joachim Trier’s heartfelt Sentimental Value has no fewer than eight nominations, with Renate Reinsve up for best female actor in a drama (though it could as well have been in the comedy category). She could well win – and it’s an interestingly unexpected inclusion for Eva Victor for their indie black comedy Sorry, Baby.
As for the supporting turns, I think Emily Blunt might well get it for her very interesting performance in the otherwise moderate The Smashing Machine and for best supporting actor my hunch is that Globe voters will be turned on by Jacob Elordi’s hunky monster in Frankenstein. (It’s a nice warmup for his Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights later in the new year.)
But this looks set to be Paul Thomas Anderson’s night and if he can induce the awards-season groupthink to endorse the value of his film with a big win, then 2026 could well be his big year.
