The 2025 winners were all over the map, portending a wide-open awards season.
Historically speaking, the point of the Golden Globes has always been two-fold. First: Get some memorable speeches out of a bunch of celebrities packed into a ballroom and plied with booze on national television. Second: Give some insight into who’s favored to win at the more prestigious Academy Awards. For better and worse, this year’s Globes didn’t really bother to do either. Save for Kieran Culkin, none of the winners seemed too buzzed to speak. Meanwhile, the nebulous Hollywood Foreign Press Association of old has been revamped and reformed with a new, broader group that has far more eclectic taste. The 2025 winners were all over the map, clarifying only that a wide-open awards season lies ahead.
By comparison, last year’s Oscar race was settled six months before the ceremony, as it just so happened that Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was both one of the year’s most acclaimed and highest-grossing movies. The inevitability of Oppenheimer gave voters the chance to acknowledge a genuine theater-packing hit and temporarily stave off existential crises about whether awards season really matters anymore—always a concern, as critical tastes have further diverged from what audiences tend to like.
This year’s race, though, is the most unpredictable in a long time. Ahead of the Oscars, which take place March 2, spiky arthouse projects, foreign-language musicals, and brassy blockbusters are all elbowing for attention. The Globes spread the wealth to some early favorites, with Emilia Pérez and The Brutalist gaining the most traction. But smaller works such as I’m Still Here and A Different Man—which might be lucky to get any Oscar love at all—also scored big.
Emilia Pérez won the most movie awards with four, though besides Best Musical or Comedy, its only other major trophy went to Zoe Saldaña for Supporting Actress. Otherwise, a sweep for the Netflix-distributed musical drama about a transsexual cartel leader—which led all movies with 10 nominations—didn’t quite materialize. Still, it pointedly nabbed the big prize over Wicked, a smash hit that has dominated the zeitgeist since Thanksgiving. That film was instead given the Cinematic and Box Office Achievement award, a chintzy pat on the head cooked up for last year’s Globes ceremony. (Barbie, a similarly populist hit that didn’t win the top prizes, received it then.)
On the more serious side, the muscular epic The Brutalist won Best Drama, along with Best Director for Brady Corbet and Best Actor in a Drama for its lead, Adrien Brody, who plays a Hungarian architect struggling in post-war America. At 215 minutes, it makes a heftier ask of audiences than most films, but Corbet’s speech was a passionate entreaty for Hollywood to support riskier work. “Nobody was asking for a three-and-a-half-hour film about a midcentury designer, in 70-millimeter,” he said. Tonight, it was feted nonetheless. The Globe wins might lightly anoint The Brutalist and Emilia Pérez as Oscar favorites, but both are still relatively outside of the mainstream, and hardly a sure thing. Another movie—be it a box-office hit like Wicked, a more down-the-middle favorite like A Complete Unknown, or a critical fave like Sean Baker’s Anora, which oddsmakers had predicted for three Globes but which ended up with none—might easily challenge them, come March.
The reconstituted Hollywood Foreign Press also took some swings that felt very far from the Globes of old, which sometimes seemed like it rewarded projects that had sent the best gift baskets to voters. Flow, a tiny, dialogue-free Latvian movie about a cat, beat out The Wild Robot and Inside Out 2 for best animated film. Fernanda Torres won Best Actress in a Drama for the charged Brazilian film I’m Still Here, over celebrities such as Angelina Jolie and Nicole Kidman. Sebastian Stan picked up Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy for A Different Man, an acidic though little-seen satire—it grossed under $1 million during its U.S. theatrical run.
Maybe the biggest surprise of the night was Demi Moore’s upset win for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy for The Substance, a spectacular piece of gross-out horror that has managed to stay in the awards conversation despite being loaded with gore and nudity. Moore beat out the ostensible favorite Mikey Madison (of Anora), megastar Zendaya (of Challengers) and Emilia Pérez’s Karla Sofía Gascón. Her success very much throws a bomb into that Oscar category, and should give a boost to a movie I had figured was too lurid for traditionally stuffy awards voters.
All of these unexpected wins did come at the expense of high-grossing movies that viewers at home have actually seen. The Brutalist is only now starting its wider theatrical rollout, whereas proven hits such as Wicked, Dune: Part Two, and Challengers were largely overlooked as the night dragged on. A crowded Oscar race approaches—and if it looks like the moneymakers aren’t picking up steam, industry observers will once again ponder the point of an awards season that doesn’t try to reflect the public’s tastes. If that must be the case, at least Golden Globe voters got appreciably weird with it.
