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When anti-racism demonstrations erupted last summer in the US and beyond, following the killing of George Floyd by the police, Hollywood was quick to offer support, but soon faced a moral dilemma when the demonstrators demanded wiping out symbols and traces of racism from America’s history and culture, including the films that featured racial stereotypes. Warner Bros.

From Bond girl to a double Nobel Prize winner, Rosamund Pike´s acting versatility has taken her from acting in massive blockbusters to two Golden Globe wins. This year she is nominated again for her performance in I Care A Lot.

Congratulations to HFPA member Lena Base for her L. A.

The British actress Vanessa Kirby was nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Actress in a Drama for her heart-wrenching performance in Pieces of a Woman, directed by Kornél Mundruczó. The screenplay was written by his wife Kata Wéber, inspired by the Hungarian couple’s tragic experience of losing a baby.

Andra Day was honored by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association with two Golden Globe nominations, as Best Actress in a Drama for The United States vs. Billie Holiday directed by Lee Daniels, and for Best Original Song, “Tigress & Tweed,” in the same film.

When in the 1920s Hollywood studios created the star system which lasted till the 1960s, young men and women were plucked from obscurity, buffed and polished and transformed into movie stars with invented names and backgrounds to glamorize them. Every aspect of their lives was controlled by the movie studios with morals clauses inserted into their contracts, and ‘fixers’ hired to cover up scandals.

Between 1948 and 1983 Golden Globes were awarded in a special category of “New Star of the Year” conceived to recognize young actors making a mark in their early roles. In this series, the HFPA’s Phil Berk highlights those that would follow their auspicious starts with distinguished careers.

This Soul has life and it continues to soar. On a traditionally slow Super Bowl weekend in the United States, made more sluggish by the coronavirus pandemic, the big news was in the international box office, where Pixar’s Soul keeps rising.

Nanfu Wang’s gripping new documentary In the Same Breath, which premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, opens on the 2019 New Year’s Eve in Wuhan, China, site of the first cases of the novel coronavirus. It may be an interesting (and fateful) coincidence that the filmmaker was a Sundance Film Festival juror in Park City on January 23, 2020, the same day Wuhan went into lockdown during the first COVID-19 outbreak.

Lucy Walker’s Bring Your Own Brigade isn't the first documentary about the devastation wrought by uncontrolled wildfires that destroyed Paradise, California. In 2020, director Ron Howard’s Rebuilding Paradise also played at the Sundance Film Festival.