The Golden Globe awards are much derided for not being the Oscars, but that won't stop 17 million Americans tuning in
On Sunday night, 17 million Americans will sit down in front of their TVs to watch an awards ceremony hosted by a bearded British comedian with a reputation for controversy. Hollywood royalty will queue up to present and receive the trophies, honouring recent efforts in the film and TV industry. The organisers, a shadowy outfit called the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), together with the show's producers, Dick Clark Productions, will bank between $14-18m in payments from the broadcasters, NBC.
News agencies, media pundits and movie-gossip websites will obsess intensely over the results for a few days – and then move on, as other awards ceremonies shove it out of the way. Welcome to the world of the Golden Globes.
The Globes have a special place in the film industry: for several decades they have been the awards equivalent of a drunken uncle lolling at the end of the sofa.
If they're known for anything, it's for being roundly mocked, for being hopelessly susceptible to Hollywood schmooze, attracting lawsuits, and – in recent years at least – getting things badly wrong. And for the third year running, the barbs of Ricky Gervais. But coming as they do in mid-January, the Globes are a key plank of what has become known as the "awards season", a jostling for position and credibility that begins with the Academy screenings in October/November, and culminates in the Oscars in late February.
The Globes are the first high-profile poll to declare a result, and are far ahead enough of the Academy Awards – the real meat and potatoes – to be a valuable stop on the campaign trail.
There's no evidence that winning a Golden Globe has much impact on a film's earning potential or critical status – unlike the Oscars, where a best picture statuette can double the box-office total.
The Globes also have no shortage of detractors; these have even included the US equivalent of Ofcom, the Federal Communications Commission, which in 1968 censured the ceremony for operating a "lobby" process – that is, awards were given to those who turned up, rather than a strict voting system. (NBC subsequently stopped broadcasting the awards for six years, until 1974.) The 89-strong HFPA is an organisation whose members have failed to inspire respect in the wider critical fraternity, composed of LA-residing writers for non-US media, and with much laxer campaign rules than the Oscars.
Critics cite the nomination of the Cher/Christina Aguilera musical Burlesque for a best motion picture (musical or comedy) award in 2011 as a particularly arrant example, after the studio backing the film had arranged for the entire HFPA membership to attend a Cher concert in Las Vegas.
Roger Ebert, the veteran critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, sums up the sceptics' view. "The members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association essentially live on a year-around junket. There is no reason to believe they are qualified to nominate." But he also accepts the Globes play a central role in ratcheting up the hype surrounding any given film. "The TV show is fun. It's part of the pre-Oscar circus, and nominations probably help a film's Oscar chances. Let's put it this way: as these things go, it is undeniably more important than the Peoples' Choice Awards."
But the Globes do have their supporters. In some quarters, the awards season is seen as the main bastion against the juggernaut of the studio blockbuster, a solid bulwark in support of "dramatic", putatively sophisticated cinema. Of course, all these things are relative, but without awards, we'd have nothing but The Green Lantern or Cowboys and Aliens – or so the theory goes. Steven Gaydos, executive editor of Hollywood trade magazine Variety, takes a defiantly non-cynical position.
"Awards season is essential to the survival of drama. The pressure on edgy stuff is tremendous, and the marketing and publicity they get from awards is the only way they have of combating the action movies."
Gaydos also points out that, even if their processes can look tawdry, the Globes rarely slip up in rewarding films that don't deserve it. "In results terms, they are hardly ever out of line. If they're so awful, why is it that the results are so impressive?"
The Globes' selections also beg a question: after they picked Avatar over The Hurt Locker, is there really a reverse curse operating? How accurate are they as Oscar predictors? The answer is: not very, at least in the past 10 years. Only four times has the best picture Oscar coincided with the winner of one of the Globes' two best picture categories: Slumdog Millionaire, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Chicago, and A Beautiful Mind. In the decade before, the hit rate was far better: only three Oscar films were not predicted (Braveheart, Unforgiven and Silence of the Lambs).
Nevertheless, the Globes are only getting bigger. Gaydos says he thinks he knows why." It's about the ecology of awards season. Everything is affected by them. The Globes are part of sustaining the talk and the buzz, fanning the flames of the forest fire. It's just like the US election – it's all about momentum."
Panel – past Globe awards
2002 A Beautiful Mind (drama); Moulin Rouge! (musical/comedy)
2003 The Hours (drama); Chicago (musical/comedy)
2004 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (drama); Lost in Translation (musical/comedy)
2005 The Aviator (drama); Sideways (musical/comedy)
2006 Brokeback Mountain (drama); Walk the Line (musical/comedy)
2007 Babel (drama); Dreamgirls (musical/comedy)
2008 Atonement (drama); Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (musical/comedy)
2009 Slumdog Millionaire (drama); Vicky Cristina Barcelona (musical/comedy)
2010 Avatar (drama); The Hangover (musical/comedy)
2011 The Social Network (drama); The Kids Are All Right (musical/comedy)