Caryn James
(BBC) – Success for Wagner Moura, Hamnet and Stellan Skarsgård at the Golden Globes has narrowed the Oscars race and set up a number of intriguing fights 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.
