81st Golden Globes: From Oppenheimer To Barbie, Revisit The Biggest Winners

This column was originally published as part of our newsletter The Daily Show on January 8, 2023. Subscribe here. (We're awesome about not spamming your inbox!)

***

THE 81st Golden Globe Awards were held with great fanfare by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association on 7 January (Monday morning, the 8th, for us here in India), to honour the best film and American television productions of 2023. The glitzy ceremony, held at The Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California, officially kicked off the awards season that will reach its zenith with the 2024 Oscars. In the spirit of celebrating some truly exceptional films and shows, we're doing a rundown of the Globes winners and nominees, and what OTTplay's critics had previously said about some of these. Ready? Let's begin with the films in this edition.

OPPENHEIMER

WINNER

Best Film – Drama

Best Original Score In A Film (Ludwig Göransson)

Best Male Actor In A Film – Drama (Cillian Murphy)

Best Director For A Film (Christopher Nolan)

Best Supporting Male Actor In A Film (Robert Downey Jr)

NOMINEE

Cinematic And Box Office Achievement

Best Screenplay For A Film (Christopher Nolan)

Best Supporting Female Actor In A Film (Emily Blunt)

In a review headlined 'The Murky Magnificence Of Christopher Nolan's Biopic', our critic Rahul Desai wrote on Oppenheimer:

(This is) a biopic that, at its boldest, is a messy manifestation of a mind torn between redemption and reckoning. Nolan deconstructs the stature of his subject without compromising on his scale. It’s a tricky balance that throws up a marriage of contrasts. There’s action in words, silences in action and slow-burning grief in the joy of invention — the scene of the Trinity, where the bomb is first tested to devastating success, mines the cold distance between light and sound. The film makes us live and grow old in that lingering pause between fire and explosion; between foresight and hindsight...

Read it here. 

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

WINNER

Best Female Actor In A Film – Drama (Lily Gladstone)

NOMINEE

Best Film – Drama

Best Original Score In A Film (Robbie Robertson)

Best Male Actor In A Film – Drama (Leonardo DiCaprio)

Best Director For A Film (Martin Scorsese)

Best Screenplay For A Film (Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese)

Best Supporting Male Actor In A Film (Robert DeNiro)

OTTplay's contributing writer Prahlad Srihari declared, in a review titled "Killers Of The Flower Moon Scrubs The Whitewash Off America's Bloody Past":

TikTok star Martin Scorsese returns in some style with Killers of the Flower Moon: a late-career moral reckoning with the myths that defined the Western genre, whitewashed America’s past and fuelled his own love for the movies. The director picks up from where he left off on the introspective path of his previous film. By challenging the violent underpinnings of the Western, as The Irishman did with the mob epic, Flower Moon transcends the limits of its genre.

Read it here. 

Also check out this take from our critic: With Killers Of The Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese 'Writes' A Few Wrongs. 

MAESTRO

NOMINEE

Best Film – Drama

Best Female Actor In A Film – Drama (Carey Mulligan)

Best Male Actor In A Film – Drama (Bradley Cooper)

Best Director For A Film (Bradley Cooper)

"In Maestro, Bradley Cooper & Carey Mulligan Compose Music For The Eyes," our critic proclaimed, then wrote:

The first hour of Maestro unfolds like a black-and-white Broadway musical in 1940s New York. An upcoming composer meets an upcoming actress at a party. They hit it off. They have sparkling chemistry. They have stimulating conversations. They inspire each other to success and fame. They marry. They have kids. They become an American power couple. The camerawork and score are sweeping, the transitions are playful, the romance is cinematic. The film-making flaunts and flexes, winks and twirls. There’s a bit of Damien Chazelle about its breathless ambition. It is indeed like watching the alt-reality montage of La La Land — except it’s not about “what if?” so much as “what next?” It’s not the end of something, but the beginning of everything.

The rest of Maestro unfolds like an alt-fiction film. The historical drama centered on the relationship between Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) and wife Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) is anything but predictable. It is jumpy and it is abrupt; it is surprising and it is tender. The film manifests the gist of its opening quote (by Bernstein himself): “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers”.

Read the column. 

PAST LIVES

NOMINEE

Best Film – Drama

Best Female Actor In A Film – Drama (Greta Lee)

Best Director For A Film (Celine Song)

Best Screenplay For A Film (Celine Song)

Best Non-English Language Film

Celine Song's 'Ode To All The Lives We'll Never Live' prompted our critic to muse:

In Past Lives, in-yeon brings together childhood sweethearts Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), only for destiny to pull them apart. This is a love story of almosts, what-ifs, paths taken vs paths missed. When Nora and Hae Sung reconnect in New York 24 years after the former’s family emigrated from South Korea, the question of the two ending up together is no longer a matter of distance, but the decisions that have put them on divergent paths. The biggest one for Nora being she is married, quite happily, to fellow writer Arthur (John Magaro). Out of this scenario comes a light-footed contemplation of what could have been and what is. Song’s film localises a world of wistful ambivalence within two childhood sweethearts whose situation is sure to inspire bittersweet memories of that someone from our own childhood we can’t seem to forget.

Read it here. 

You may also be interested in this column that we published on Song's "wistful film (that) pits the stories we tell ourselves against the stories that happen to us": 'Past Lives & The Language Of Dreaming' 

ANATOMY OF A FALL

WINNER

Best Non-English Language Film

Best Screenplay For A Film (Justine Triet and Arthur Harari)

NOMINEE

Best Female Actor In A Film – Drama (Sandra Hüller)

Anatomy Of A Fall was among the films we wrote about as part of our round-up of 2023's best films, in December. Read the piece: 'Justine Triet's Taut Courtroom Drama Summons Truth To The Witness Stand' 

BARBIE

WINNER

Cinematic And Box Office Achievement

Best Original Song In A Film ('What Was I Made For?', by Billie Eilish and Finneas)

NOMINEE

Best Film – Musical Or Comedy

Best Original Song In A Film ('I’m Just Ken', by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt)

Best Original Song In A Film ('Dance the Night', by Caroline Ailin, Dua Lipa, Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt)

Best Female Actor In A Film – Musical Or Comedy (Margot Robbie)

Best Director For A Film (Greta Gerwig)

Best Screenplay For A Film (Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach)

Best Supporting Male Actor In A Film (Ryan Gosling)

"I have a sneaky feeling that Barbie – the iconic plastic doll of perfect pinkness and curated agency – was the last addition to Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s latest film about curated pinkness and perfect agency," our critic wrote, of Barbie. "I suspect the toy came into the picture at the very end, when the film-makers found themselves wondering how to spell out (a subset of “sell out”) a social comedy while sounding self-aware about it. What’s the coolest way to human-splain feminism, wokeness, consumerism and patriarchy-bashing while turning the film’s didactic tone into a pretty in-joke? By setting it in that fantasy-plastic world, of course, where conversing in poker-faced subtext and blatant commentary defines the film’s live-action gimmick."

Read it here: 'The Empty & Entertaining Glow Of Greta Gerwig’s Film' 

Next, a lowdown on the most decorated TV shows at the Globes.