Success for Wagner Moura, Hamnet and Stellan Skarsgård at the Golden Globes has narrowed the Oscars race and set up a number of intriguing battles to watch.
Get ready for Jessie Buckley v Rose Byrne, and Timothée Chalamet v Wagner Moura, just two of the five major Oscar races that should be especially fun to watch and that the Golden Globes just helped to clarify. Only a few hundred people vote for the Globes and more than 10,000 for the Oscars, so it shouldn’t make sense that they are such important factors in the Oscar race. But then this is show business, where hype and image-making rule, where being perceived as a winner is almost as good as being one. The Globes may be confusing in the way they wrangle categories, and they may be miniscule in their voting numbers, but they offer visibility, momentum, and a sense of who is already considered the “best something or other”, which creates an outsized impact on the Oscars.
Dividing the major awards into separate categories for drama and for musical or comedy films makes the Globes off-kilter as Oscar predictors, but that very separation tends to narrow the race and set up the most engaging head-to-head battles. Two years ago, Lily Gladstone’s Globes win in drama for Killers of the Flower Moon and Emma Stone’s win in comedy for Poor Things created a down-to-the wire race leading to Stone’s second Oscar. This year gave us similar mano-a-manos in the lead acting categories.
1. Best actress: Real competition?
Buckley has long been considered the Oscar favourite for Hamnet, the high-powered film about Shakespeare’s wife grieving their small son, and her Globes win in drama solidified her frontrunner status. But Byrne has emerged as her only true competition after winning in the musical/comedy category for the small independent film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. You really have to stretch the definition of comedy to understand how Legs ended up in that category. There are moments of frantic scrambling in the film but Byrne’s performance as the harried mother of a sick child is fraught with tension and anxiety. Slippery categories aside, though, add Byrne’s Globes victory to her wins at the Berlin Film Festival and with the New York and Los Angeles critics groups, and she can’t be ruled out. The Globes’ weird category split has created a real race.
2. Best actor: A new contender
One narrative took hold almost as soon as Marty Supreme was first shown in the autumn: that the Oscar was Timothée Chalamet’s to lose for his role as an annoying would-be ping-pong champion. He is brilliant and fascinating as a character who could have been just grating. His Globe win in comedy strengthens that narrative, but only to a point, because he now has competition from Wagner Moura, who won in drama, beating Michael B Jordan in Sinners. Moura, who gives a brilliant, layered and charismatic performance in the Brazilian political thriller The Secret Agent, had a lot riding on the Globes.
Winner of the best actor award at Cannes, he was widely considered a sure thing for an Oscar nomination until the Actor awards (previously the SAG awards) nominations were announced last week and Moura, along with every other performer in a film not in the English language, was left out. Since actors are the largest voting block among Academy Awards voters, that wasn’t a great sign. It’s true that Globes members (who are international journalists) are more likely to embrace a performance not in English, but still: that win puts Moura firmly back in the running.
3 and 4. Supporting actor and actress: Shaking up the races
Some years, one performer easily swoops up every major predictor award en route to the Oscars, the way Kieran Culkin did last year as supporting actor in A Real Pain – Golden Globe, Bafta, SAG award and Oscar, he got them all. This is not one of those years. The Globes’ supporting categories are, in fact, similar to the Oscars because they are not separated into drama and comedy. And this year’s Globes blew both supporting races wide open.
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