I Miss When the Golden Globes Were Deranged

If the 2026 Golden Globes had a theme, it was “Normal service restored.” After four months of Oscars season lifting up some contenders and humbling others, the Globes in many ways looped us back to where we thought we’d be in September: One Battle After Another cleaning up, Hamnet as the runner-up, Sinners as a crafts-only play.

That message was sent early in the night with the ceremony’s first two categories, Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress. These were the two least predictable races on the film side, and they’d recently gotten more chaotic thanks to the Critics Choice Awards the weekend before. In Supporting Actress, which has been as wide-open an acting race as we’ve seen in years, Critics Choice went with Amy Madigan in Weapons — an extremely gonzo, extremely Internet-friendly pick. In Supporting Actor, the two nominees from One Battle After Another apparently split the vote at the CCAs, clearing a path for Frankenstein’s Jacob Elordi, a challenge to the conventional wisdom that 28-year-old hunks don’t win trophies. (Being a 28-year-old hunk is usually considered its own reward.)

Neither of these wins repeated at the Globes, where the supporting prizes went to Teyana Taylor of OBAA and Stellan Skarsgård of Sentimental Value. For better and for worse, this duo feels like a much more plausible pair of Oscar winners: Taylor as an electric performer in the Best Picture front-runner, Skarsgård as a venerable European near the end of a long career. So plausible, in fact, that many pundits fingered each for the win at the beginning of the season. Taylor and Skarsgård were both worthy winners who gave memorable speeches, but taken together, their wins seemed like a sign of Globes voters preemptively aligning their tastes with the Academy’s, rather than delivering distinctive wins in their own right.

Something similar occurred with Hamnet. Since the literary adaptation won the TIFF People’s Choice Award in September, its buzz had gotten awfully quiet. As Blank Check’s JJ Bersch wrote a few weeks ago, “it barely feels like the movie even exists at this point, weirdly.” Once Rose Byrne started taking critics’ prizes for her turn as a frazzled mother in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, fans wondered if she could possibly upset Hamnet’s Jessie Buckley, who since Telluride had been pegged as the race’s indomitable Goliath. Byrne’s hot streak continued when she won Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy at the Globes, but while she delivered a lovely, charming speech — which ended with the news that her husband, Bobby Cannavale, couldn’t make it because he was attending a reptile convention in New Jersey — it was probably the last speech she’ll get to give this season. As expected, Buckley won the other Best Actress trophy, and Hamnet’s 11th-hour Best Drama win seemed to prove the film does indeed have enough juice for the Irish actress to sweep from here on out.

As will be the case in a three-hour show, there were a couple small surprises. Brazil’s The Secret Agent taking Best Foreign-Language Film, alongside star Wagner Moura’s win for Best Actor in a Drama, indicates that the hierarchy of power in the Neon universe may be about to change. Is the movie the new front-runner for the International Film Oscar, and if so, what does that mean for the presumed heavyweights in that category, It Was Just an Accident and Sentimental Value, and their chances of sneaking into Best Picture? (Or is this just a case of Brazilians, the largest international contingent in the Globes’ membership, having a home-field advantage at this ceremony?)

Now, there’s nothing wrong, exactly, with any of the Globes’ picks. If they wanted to vote for Stellan Skarsgård, let them vote for Stellan Skarsgård! (Especially since Skarsgård wasn’t nominated at SAG, giving his win Sunday night a little extra weight.) It’s just that this is the exact opposite of the way the Globes used to be. Usually, they’d be the ones injecting a little insanity into the race, like when they handed Best Supporting Actor to Aaron Taylor Johnson in Nocturnal Animals in a year when Moonlight’s Mahershala Ali was winning everywhere else. Or, that same night, awarded one of their Best Actress awards to Isabelle Huppert for Elle when everyone assumed Jackie’s Natalie Portman had it in the bag. In an alternate awards-season universe, it would have been the Globes who gave Jacob Elordi and Amy Madigan their trophies and made us all question reality. Now, after having been canceled and reborn, the show has lost its signature sense of derangement, and there’s something a little sad about that.

Still, the old Globes live on in one respect. By snubbing Sinners in Best Drama, handing it a consolation-prize Box Office Achievement award, and punting its only other win (Best Score) to a commercial break, Sunday’s ceremony continued the proud Golden Globes tradition of disrespecting Black-led films. That’s one piece of awards-season heritage they just can’t quit.