Golden Globes kick off Hollywood award festivities
BEVERLY HILLS, California—Hollywood begins its 2025 awards festivities with the annual Golden Globes, where Timothee Chalamet, Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande are among the stars in the running for acting honors, ahead of the Oscars.
The red-carpet ceremony on Sunday will be hosted for the first time by comedian Nikki Glaser and will be broadcast live on CBS and streamed on Paramount+.
Glaser, a stand-up comic known for skewering football legend Tom Brady during a roast on Netflix, said she set some boundaries for herself this year.
“This is not a roast,” she told Reuters in an interview. “This is a night to celebrate stuff, so I want to set a good tone and I want people who were nominated to feel proud of themselves. I don’t want them to feel under attack.”
Spanish-language musical “Emilia Perez” and post-World War Two epic “The Brutalist” lead the movie nominees.
“The Brutalist” stars Adrien Brody in his second role as a Holocaust survivor, who flees to the United States to chase the American dream.
The three hour-plus film is considered a frontrunner for best drama, the night’s top prize.
Competitors include “Conclave,” a fictionalized account of high-stakes Vatican horse-trading behind the selection of a pope, and two movies starring Chalamet—Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” and sci-fi epic “Dune: Part Two.”
Scott Feinberg, executive editor for awards at The Hollywood Reporter, predicted that either “The Brutalist” or “Conclave” would earn the drama prize.
The musical or comedy category—which includes box office smash “Wicked” and film-festival favorite “Anora”—is harder to gauge, he said, since the nominees are considerably different from one another.
Diverse category
“Wicked,” the movie adaptation of the hit Broadway musical, earned four nominations, including for Tony winner Cynthia Erivo as the green-skinned Elphaba and pop sensation Ariana Grande as the bubbly pink-clad Glinda.
“Anora,” about a sex worker who marries the son of a Russian oligarch, is more of a traditional comedy while “The Substance,” starring Demi Moore as a fading celebrity seeking the fountain of youth, is essentially a horror movie, Feinberg said.
French director Jacques Audiard’s genre-defying “Emilia Perez,” a musical thriller, tells the story of a Mexican drug lord who transitions to life as a woman.
The mostly Spanish-language film, which first made waves in Cannes last year, earned 10 nominations—the most ever for a comedy or musical—including three acting nods for Selena Gomez, Zoe Saldana and Karla Sofia Gascon, who plays the title character.
Leading in the TV categories are restaurant tale “The Bear,” mystery comedy “Only Murders in the Building” and historical epic “Shogun.”
Revamp
The Globes are in year two of a revamp, following a Los Angeles Times expose in 2021 that showed that the awards’ voting body—the Hollywood Foreign Press Association—had no Black members.
Now under new ownership, and with the foreign press group disbanded, organizers are hoping to capitalize on a ratings bump registered last January, and perhaps even burnish the gala’s status as a predictor of Oscars success.
