The Golden Globes Don't Deserve Coverage. Here's Why

This story has been updated to reflect the Golden Globes’ sale and transition to a for-profit entity.

The Golden Globes, the film and TV awards distributed by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, aren’t worth covering. It doesn’t matter how deeply down the awards season rabbit hole you happen to be, how desperately devoted your Oscar parties are—they’re bad in every conceivable way and every time they’re covered, they maintain their power.

Instead of constantly posting new records of their nominations and winners, we’re going to dig into what the HFPA is, what its members ostensibly do and why the Golden Globes’ track record means that they should fade into obscurity rather than continue getting lucrative TV deals. The problems with the Globes are threefold: Shady HFPA membership with questionable credentials, a history of corruption and bribery, and a parasitic shock-jock relationship with the industry.

That’s putting aside Brendan Fraser’s claim that he was blacklisted because former HFPA president Philip Berk groped him (Berk was finally ousted in 2021 after calling Black Lives Matter a “racist hate movement”). That’s also putting aside the racist controversy that happened around 2020’s slate of films, when the HFPA decided that the American-made Minari wasn’t eligible for Best Picture categories and had to compete only in the Foreign Language category because it’s primarily in Korean.

Yes, those are already pretty major things to put aside, but in the latter case, the Oscars haven’t exactly had a spotless racism record. The difference is that the Oscars, as an extension of the industry organization The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, made initiatives and changes to both their voting body’s demographics and to the films they consider. How effective are they? Well, that’s worth its own piece. But at least those more prestigious awards have a share of people behind them that are cognizant of their own power in writing the canon of film in the public eye.

Most Popular

So, back to the Globes and why they’re bad. First is who the HFPA actually is. On its face, it’s ~95 people living in southern California who write (or at least have written) for non-U.S. publications. Their application has changed since 2018, now requiring:

Publication of at least 24 stories in the last three years
Evidence that these publications pay for these stories
Sponsorship by two current HFPA members
MPAA accreditation

It’s unclear if the organization is still requiring the $500 initiation fee. What is clear is that the HFPA is still incredibly insular and small. The Oscars’ Academy has 9,599 current voters, over 100 times more. But that’s not a huge problem on its face: Critics groups around the world are small, regional organizations of qualified individuals. “Qualified” is the sticking point here.

Since the HFPA is notoriously clandestine when it comes to who is actually in the organization, let’s focus on the three new members admitted to the HFPA in 2020: Yulia Charysheva, Sabrina Joshi and Danielle Kool. Charysheva is a marketing director for a film company. Joshi is the daughter of a longtime HFPA member. None of them—as far as I can tell—have published any film criticism, reviews or essays in the past year. Instead, their portfolios include rewritten press releases and softball interviews with questions like “Do you know how you’ll be celebrating this Valentine’s Day?” We won’t even touch on the eight stories/year number, which most writers in our industry knock out—conservatively, of course—in a few months.

Then you’ve got the even weirder stragglers: Caroline Framke notes that HFPA members’ claims to fame span playing Gandhi on Star Trek: Voyager, not publishing anything at all or being “just plain curious,” as Russian bodybuilder/HFPA voter Alexander Nevsky explained. This seemingly random assortment of members without any real journalistic or critical rigor feeds into rampant, long-standing claims of a “culture of corruption” that prioritizes junkets (promotional tours that boil down to freebie trips where such aforementioned interview softballs can be lobbed) and other general starfuckery.

Those are the ~95 people that Hollywood has to impress. And impress them it does. The pay-to-win ethos of the Golden Globes has been an open secret—hell, it’s been a punchline—for years. There’s a whole 30 Rock episode about it. Christ, Denzel Washington jokes about it (at 8:45 in the below video) while accepting a lifetime achievement award from the Golden Globes:

Berk, that accused assaulter? He published a memoir in 2014 stating that the Globes weren’t dictated by quality, but by access. And that’s the former president of the organization talking.

There’ve been a few egregiously bought-and-paid-for awards in the Globes’ history—like terrible actress Pia Zadora’s Best Actress award (after flying HFPA members to Vegas) or Sharon Stone’s too-obvious bribe of $400 watches to each HFPA member—but the general sense is that these random writers are in it to schmooze with the A-listers and get free stuff. Basically, everyone that harps on film critics for being “Disney shills” or some variation should really be leveling these claims at the HFPA. It’s an organization defined by autograph hounds and selfie-seekers, people who care less about the movies than about being adjacent to those who make them.

And now, as of 2023, it’s a for-profit endeavor owned by billionaire Todd Boehly’s Eldridge Industries—a self-inflicted checkmate capping the Globes’ completely wrongheaded rebrand. Guess what for-profit entities don’t have to do? Show everyone their finances every year. That means any semblance of philanthropy or taste can be discarded and the corruption can run even deeper, something already being announced clear as day: Globes members are now salaried employees (a cool $75,000 a year for voting, pre-bribes), hired-gun publicists masquerading as journalists, feasting on the cash generated by their own bad reputation. At least, the original members are; the hundreds of new, diverse voters the Globes were forced to recruit (but not hire) after that whole “you don’t have any Black members at all” thing will go unpaid. If you thought the Globes’ main problem was its white supremacy, it has unfortunately been cemented in financial black-and-white: There are two distinct castes at play, one of homogenous wealth and one of unabashed tokenism.

And that’s not even mentioning Boehly’s exhaustive conflicts of interest: At one point, “Boehly not only ran the HFPA and owned the production company that produced the Globes, he also owned the Beverly Hilton Hotel, where the awards had taken place for decades, as well as MRC—which produced movies and shows that competed for Golden Globes.” He still maintains a minority stake in MRC, producer of TV and film that, as per its website, boasts “21 Golden Globe Awards,” producer/distributor A24 and invests in Penske Media, the company owning industry publications (the kind that might otherwise criticize the Globes) like Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, TVLine, Rolling Stone, IndieWire, Vox, and Deadline. There’s vertical integration and then there’s making a mockery of critical thought. The famously corrupt awards body is now a company, owned by a private equity firm, that earns revenue by giving out awards to movies produced by companies the private equity firm invests in, all advertised in and covered by outlets owned by a media corporation financially entangled with the same private equity firm. It’s monopolistic masturbation, capitalizing on people who are either media illiterate or simply so cynical that they’ve decided to join the circlejerk.

And hey, if all that behavior was for a small, easily ignored event, so what? But it’s not. It’s for a perennially aired awards show on NBC, which “was paying in the mid-$20 million a year” for the honor. The Globes get attention from media, industry members and audiences alike. They certainly help dictate what movies people (including Oscar voters) are watching and consider important, partially because the nominations of those ~95 are so wildly strange (each member carries a lot more voting weight than a member of the Academy, not to mention that movies/actors that are already widely considered “good” don’t usually need to grease so many palms) that it’s become a bit of a running joke that people hate-watch (or hate-cover). What will those ridiculous Globes nominate, let alone choose as their winners? Let’s all tune in and make our jokes—and boost their numbers.

But it’s also because of lazy tradition, propping up an organization that has no place holding such power. And it’s easy to end it. By not covering the Golden Globes, by not watching the nominees drunkenly pat each other on the back and mock the awards show’s unethical foundation to its face, we can slowly let it and its ilk die off. What’s left over won’t be an ideal system for recognizing the year’s best movies, but it certainly won’t nominate The Tourist for three Comedy awards.

Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.

For all the latest movie news, reviews, lists and features, follow @PasteMovies.

The Golden Globes Don’t Deserve Coverage. Here’s Why