Emilia Perez, Shogun and host Nikki Glaser come out on top at rejuvenated Golden Globes
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A diverse set of winners and a genuinely funny host – the 2025 Golden Globes made awards season look simple, writes Kevin E G Perry. It was a year of comebacks at the Golden Globes. Not just for Pamela Anderson, the Nineties icon nominated for her show-stopping appearance in Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, or Demi Moore, who won the first major award of her career for her turn in The Substance. No, the most significant return to form was pulled off by the Golden Globes itself. A couple of years ago, the awards show looked to be fighting for its life. Tonight, it put in a performance worthy of picking up, well, its very own prize.
Back in 2022, the Golden Globes ceremony was widely boycotted and pulled from television as then-parent organisation the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) became engulfed in a diversity and ethics scandal. The fallout was so dramatic that the HFPA was disbanded in 2023 and replaced by a new organisation under the management of Jay Penske, whose Penske Media Corporation owns all the major Hollywood entertainment publications (Variety, Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline), and Todd Boehly, a businessman best known in the UK as the owner of Chelsea Football Club.
Another of the night’s major triumphs belonged to director Brady Corbet, whose film The Brutalist picked up several key awards to leave it a firm favourite for the Oscars, which take place two months from now on Sunday 2 March. His sprawling three-and-a-half hour film comes complete with an intermission, but that didn’t put off voters who named it Best Drama as well as giving Corbet the prize for Best Director and star Adrien Brody the nod for Best Actor in a Drama. In his second acceptance speech of the night, Corbet pointed out how often he’d been told that a very long film about a Holocaust survivor architect just didn’t seem like a safe commercial bet, and used the film’s success to advocate for the importance of letting directors have final say over their films.
