Daniel Kaluuya celebrates his Best Supporting Actor win. Photo: NBC The weirdest Oscar year ever gave us the weirdest Golden Globes ever — an event suffused with the muted dread of a Monday-morning Zoom meeting, taking place under a cloud of controversy that called into question the very existence of the ceremony itself. But despite all that changed in the last 12 months, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association still managed to perform its most basic function: They handed out a bunch of trophies on TV, sometimes following consensus, other times following their own eccentric muse. With Oscar nomination voting beginning this week, how did their picks affect the race? As always, when it comes to the Globes’ influence of the Oscars, the usual asterisks apply: The Globes are voted on by 90-something anonymous international journalists who absolutely love free trips to Paris and absolutely hate inviting any Black people into their ranks. Perhaps knowing all eyes would be on their suddenly well-publicized issues, on Sunday the HFPA gave us a remarkably diverse slate of winners : In the 14 film categories, there was only one instance of a white winner besting a Black nominee. (It was Best Song, where Diane Warren’s Italian power ballad “Io Sì” took the prize.) Was this the awards-ceremony version of a racist Bachelor contestant Instagramming a copy of White Fragility ? Perhaps. But it also meant a set of results far more interesting than many pundits assumed , with intriguing implications for the Oscar race. Let’s start with the night’s big prize, Best Drama, where Nomadland beat out its closest rival, The Trial of the Chicago 7 . Predictions had them basically neck-and-neck going into the night, but the conventional wisdom was that Chicago 7 had a slight advantage: Not only was it the mainstream, accessible choice, it was also written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, a longtime HFPA fave. By triumphing anyway, Nomadland was able to quiet the … [Read more...] about How the Golden Globe Results Just Changed the Oscar Race