The best, worst, and most surprising moments from the 2024 Golden Globes

There are a lot of awards to give out at the Golden Globes (now 27 in all), and there’s only so much time to hand them out. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for lengthy acceptance speeches. In the past, winners who stuck around beyond their allotted time were played off by the orchestra, but that didn’t happen this year. We’re not sure what the producers said to scare everyone into complying, but pretty much all of the winners kept their speeches short. Still, some of them got in a few good lines. Matthew McFadyen called his Succession character Tom Wambsgans a “human grease stain,” while his castmate Kieran Culkin told fellow nominee Pedro Pascal, “Suck it Pedro” after beating him out for Best Actor in a TV drama. Ayo Edibiri thanked the assistants who work for her agents and managers.

Hosting the Golden Globes is a tough gig with very specific requirements, and although Jo Koy may be a popular comedian who can fill stadiums, he just wasn’t the right fit here. The ideal Globes host is a Hollywood insider who can also bring an outsider’s point of view to the comedy. Koy admitted right up top that he hadn’t seen most of the nominated films and TV shows and seemed starstruck by the celebrities in the audience. He went on to make jokes about Robert De Niro’s age and Barry Keoghan’s penis, and described Barbie as a movie about “a plastic doll with big boobies.” Worse yet, when he realized the jokes weren’t landing he insisted they were funny, and blamed the other writers for the ones that weren’t. His appearances throughout the rest of the show were limited and more subdued. Whether that was always planned or a decision made on the fly we may never know.

Sharp-eyed viewers caught Jennifer Lawrence, who was nominated for her performance in No Hard Feelings, mouthing something to the camera while the nominees for her category were being read off. It soon became one of the hottest topics of the night. Apparently, what she said was: “If I don’t win, I’m leaving.” It was obviously a joke, emphasized by the fact that she seemed for Emma Stone when she was announced as the winner and even looked a little teary as Stone delivered her speech.

When Robert Downey Jr. took the stage early in the night to accept his award for Best Supporting Actor in Oppenheimer, it felt like the show suddenly came alive. His joke about taking beta blockers before the show got a bigger laugh than any of Jo Koy’s material. He went on to make a few self-effacing jokes about restarting his career, thanked his wife for keeping him on track, and commended the Golden Globes for having journalists vote on the nominations. It was a trend that would continue, with other winners thanking the “journalists” instead of the “voters.” Just in case anyone watching was under the impression that the same shady group of people were still handing them out.

We get what the Globes were doing by pairing last year’s winners with co-presenters, but many of the pairings didn’t even look good on paper, let alone on the stage. America Ferrara and Kevin Costner? Ray Romano and Keri Russell? Natalie Portman and Florence Pugh? There’s always some awkwardness between presenters, and the banter can often be cringy, but why make that even more difficult by putting two people together who don’t seem like they would hang out unless forced to by some awards show producers. Even longtime friends Ben Affleck and Matt Damon didn’t seem all that friendly on stage together.

The first sign that this was a very different awards show than in past years was the win for Anatomy Of A Fall in the category of Best Screenplay. In the days of the HFPA we would have seen a more populist choice like Barbie, Oppenheimer, or Killers Of The Flower Moon win in this category, but the journalists who are now picking the awards aren’t reluctant to honor a foreign film that few of those watching at home have seen. Not that Justine Triet and Arthur Harari didn’t deserve it.

The one presenting duo that nailed it was Kristen Wiig and Will Ferrell, who came out to announce the award for Best Actor in a Comedy Film (which would go to Paul Giamatti for The Holdovers). The former Saturday Night Live castmates pretended to play it straight at first. Then, after hearing a snippet of a bouncy song (the royalty-free classic “Fluffing A Duck”), they broke out into a goofy dance that got the most genuine laughs of the night from the audience. And that was before Ferrell hilariously ad-libbed, “It smells like hot sushi in here.”

Bringing the stars of the canceled show Suits on stage might have seemed like a good idea at first, but the producers didn’t really think it through. There’s one good joke to be made about waiting a long time to get the recognition you deserve, and not much else to say beyond that. Stars Patrick J. Adams and Gabriel Macht came out by themselves at first to deliver it on their own, then were joined unannounced by co-stars Gina Torres and Sarah Rafferty. Perhaps their appearance was supposed to be a big moment, but there was hardly any time to react before they had to give out the award for Best TV drama and give the folks from Succession their moment in the spotlight.

The surprise here isn’t the win itself, because Hayao Miyazaki’s late-career masterpiece certainly deserves it, we just didn’t expect the Globes voters to actually choose it over Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse, an immensely popular and successful sequel to a previous Golden Globe winner. It’s yet another example of the difference between this year’s voting body and the HFPA of the past. Although the films are stylistically very different, they represent a great year in animation and a tougher than usual category.

Oddly, there wasn’t much talk about the biggest story in Hollywood in 2023, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes that ground the industry to a halt. Maybe the wounds are still too fresh to reopen, but it’s the kind of thing that would have been brought up more in the days of the Old Globes. The only time it was mentioned in any real way was during the introduction for the Best Screenwriting award. Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, and Daniel Kaluuya demonstrated the importance of writers by reading a hilariously bad introduction that was supposedly written by studio executives. Though none of them are known for being especially comedic actors, it was funnier than anything in Jo Koy’s monologue.

Ricky Gervais has had a rocky relationship with the Golden Globes, so maybe they were trying to make it up to him by giving him the first ever award for Best Performance In Stand-Up Comedy on TV. There wasn’t much in the way of innovation in this to begin with, but giving the award in its inaugural year to Gervais for his smug and unfunny special is just embarrassing. And he didn’t even bother to show up for the ceremony. To add insult to injury, Jim Gaffigan’s solidly funny intro reminded us of what an actually good stand-up performance is supposed to be.

As Jo Koy pointed out at the beginning of the show, Meryl Streep tends to win every time she’s nominated for an acting award, so it came as a bit of a surprise when she lost the Golden Globe to Elizabeth Debicki for her supporting performance as Princess Diana on The Crown. Streep already had the record for the most acting wins at the Globes, so it’s not like she needed another trophy for her mantle. She was very good this season on Only Murders In The Building, though.

Lily Gladstone just became the first Indigenous actress to win a Golden Globe for a leading performance in a drama. Her emotional turn in Killers Of The Flower Moon has already been earning acclaim and accolades, and her acceptance speech was fittingly moving. She gave part of it in the language of the Blackfeet nation and thanked her mother for championing the teaching of it on the reservation where she grew up. She also pointed out how far Hollywood has come from the days when they would record actors in English and play it backward to simulate native dialogue.

Reports started coming out early in the evening on social media that the seating for the ceremony had turned into a disaster. Due to the setup of round tables in a ballroom, an extended stage, and a large number of nominees, many guests were bumped to the back of the room or had to stand. Even Kieran Culkin, who would go on to win a Golden Globe later in the evening, posted on Instagram that he and his wife had no seats. It also made for long walks to the stage for some of the winners, including cast members from Beef and The Bear, two shows that were both highly favored to win.