Correct me if I’m wrong, but participation trophies—those little marks of a job well done so often derided by conservative talking heads—were not traditionally handed out to actual competition winners. If you got a shiny ribbon or a modest trophy for coming in one of the top spots, you weren’t also given an additional award for the big-hearted tenacity that got you into the competition. The winner won. Why would they need an additional prize just to blow their head up even more?
That’s the question I found myself asking during this year’s Golden Globes, where a new category seems specifically designed to honor a few movies just for being mainstream enough to be a part of the conversation. This “Cinematic and Box Office Achievement” category is comprised of eight nominees, each of which reached “a box office receipt total/gross of $150 million, of which $100 million must come from the U.S. domestic box office, and/or obtain commensurate digital streaming viewership recognized by trusted industry sources,” according to a statement from the Globes last fall.
In layman’s terms: The Golden Globes is honoring box office juggernauts that might not have otherwise been nominated, probably to get eyeballs on their ceremony. (And, even further simplified: The producers would likely love for the legions of diehard Swifties to tune into their program to see if Taylor Swift might win the award.) It’s all a not-so-clever ruse, an attempt at renewed relevancy, one that will not successfully ingratiate the Globes to viewers after public disgrace. To do that, the producers would have to actually put in the effort to make the show fun again.
If you did a double take a couple of sentences back, you read that right: Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour is one of the eight films nominated in this new category. That film, which broke box office records as the highest-grossing concert film in history, joins Barbie, John Wick: Chapter 4, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Oppenheimer, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and The Super Mario Bros. Movie in this less-than-esteemed group. The Globes organizers haven’t bothered to say how this award works, but one assumes that it wouldn’t just automatically go to the film that grossed the most money. (Though, wouldn’t that kind of defeat the title of the category?) Rather, voters would presumably opt for what they think is the “best” out of this collection of misfits. Or maybe they’d pick the one that most bolstered the American economy? What is this, post-depression wartime when the cost-a-nickel talkies went right back to the steel factories?
Golden Globes host Jo Koy joked about the category in his bomb of an opening monologue, laughing at how Barbie (”a doll with plastic boobies” —hilarious observation!) was up against Oppenheimer, a film about mankind’s inherent brutality. The joke barely got a chuckle from the audience, who perhaps correctly recognized that being forced to listen to Koy’s punchline was an act of brutality all on its own. And when it finally came time to announce the winner, the atmosphere at The Beverly Hilton could not have been less buzzy.
Though the legendary Mark Hamill showed up to present the award, spirits stayed tempered. “These films were nominated not just for their popularity, but for the high caliber of their filmmaking,” Hamill read off the teleprompter. Despite being one of the best and most versatile voices in the biz, it was hard to believe Hamill’s words, especially when the following montage of all of the films put something like Oppenheimer against the third movie in a Marvel franchise. But in the end, it was the film that made the most money that won Best Cinematic and Box Office Achievement: Barbie.
Rich Rich Polk/Golden Globes 2024/Golden Globes 2024 via Getty Images
Whether or not this outcome would’ve been different in any other year is anyone’s guess. If the highest-grossing movie had been completely computer-generated superhero schlock, would it still take home the gold? That’s a question we probably won’t have the answer to until the 2025 Globes ceremony. But it’s also a question that the winners didn’t exactly dodge.
“I want to dedicate this to every single person on the planet who dressed up and went to the greatest place on Earth: the movie theaters,” Barbie star Margot Robbie said onstage, noting the point of purchase. And while director Greta Gerwig thanked the movie’s co-writer Noah Baumbach and all of the “Barbies and Kens,” Robbie pivoted the speech back to the money for its conclusion. “We want to thank the brave individuals at Warner and Mattel for inventing numbers to justify greenlighting this [movie], and standing by it every step of the way.”
It’s hard to complain too much about Barbie, a film I adored, winning this award. That movie, and the entire Barbenheimer phenomenon that led up to it, essentially revitalized the American box office post-pandemic, and proved that it’s worth it for studios to take a chance on unique ideas and unexpected stories. But that the Globes’ organizers are co-opting Barbie’s worldwide popularity—and the acclaim of the other films in the Cinematic and Box Office Achievement category—in the hopes of juicing up viewership leaves a sour taste to this win.
The Golden Globes is an institution whose producers are attempting to pull the ceremony back from ruin. A glaring lack of diversity and a reluctance to solve that problem nearly shuttered this show for good a few years ago. The Globes was always the less stuffy awards show option, not as buttoned-up as the Emmys or the Oscars. The producers plied celebrities with booze to get them acting wild. Because of this reputation, the show was accessible to Americans whether they lived on the coasts or smack dab in the middle of the Rust Belt. Who would want to miss the show with the most shocking moments of awards season?
But this is a new era, and throwing together a new category at the last minute and casting another globe in gold for a movie that made a bunch of cash isn’t the way to go. Americans just want to see movies they love, not see all of the excesses that their hard-earned money paid for rubbed in their faces. The Cinematic and Box Office Achievement category is merely a way to lure viewers back in, just to watch the spoils that those hefty box office numbers wrought. It’s transparent and useless, two descriptors that one would think the Globes want to stay far away from.
The Golden Globes are no longer “Hollywood’s biggest party.” When the voice of God repeated that old phrase at the top of the show, it felt like the barman at a dying saloon, announcing that happy hour pricing had just started at an empty bar. The Globes was once a place where “anything could happen,” but they earned that reputation because of its crafty nominees. Gone is the era where Amy Poehler and Tina Fey skewered James Cameron so badly, he had to delay Avatar 2 for another nine years just to let the dust settle. Now, the party is long over, and everyone is showing up solely to honor a dying tradition. But if things at the Globes don’t soon change, even the most obvious pandering to new viewers won’t be enough to bring this show off life support.
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