2023 Golden Globes

George Clooney is that rare artist who makes Hollywood better: endlessly creative, fiercely loyal, and not at all plagued by the insecurities of your typical actor, he has been called the smartest man in the film industry by many. For the 2015 Golden Globes, he was chosen as the Cecil B.

The 71st Golden Globe Awards held on January 12, 2014, was a time to recognize and celebrate the LGBTQ+ community, with major wins by such films as Behind the Candelabra and Dallas Buyers Club. The latter, directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (Big Little Lies, Sharp Objects), is a biographical drama scripted by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack.

It was a “coming out” speech, although described as “sort of,” that still made headlines around the world. While Jodie Foster had previously thanked “beautiful Cydney (Bernard)” at a Power 100 Women in Entertainment 2007 event, her remarks as part of her acceptance speech as the Cecil B.

When Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi was asked to participate in a Sight and Sound film poll in 2012 by naming his list of the greatest films of all time, his first choice was Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950). That choice should not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Farhadi’s films.

Anyone who still believes Hollywood’s ancient rule-of-thumb — that one page of a script equals one minute on screen — has never seen a film written by Aaron Sorkin. That is especially true with the movie which dominated the Golden Globes celebration of 2011, The Social Network.

Believe it or not, Jeff Bridges owes part of his Golden Globe Best Actor win for Crazy Heart to Michael Cimino and Heaven’s Gate. Widely considered one of the biggest commercial failures in Hollywood history (though it’s since garnered more favorable acclaim), the 1980 western still serves as industry shorthand for creative overindulgence.

The 66th Golden Globe Awards, held on January 11, 2009, served up a very interesting cross-section of all kinds of work and talent. Bruce Springsteen got his second Golden Globe for his same-named song The Wrestler.

When, in 2008, Daniel Day-Lewis was fêted with the Best Actor Golden Globe for his work in There Will Be Blood, little did he know it would mark the first of a litany of honors he would receive that year as he dominated the cinematic awards circuit. Unfortunately, it was also the year of a Writers Guild of America strike.

The discussion was, shall we say, quite animated: it was around 2005 when Hollywood Foreign Press Association members felt animated films should have a unique category, pointing out the difficulty of judging animation the same way as live-action films. Others argued a film is a film, whatever the means of their creation.

Since the very first days of cinema, there was a kinship between the written words used to help lend motion to those moving pictures, and higher literature. Popular books were adapted as early as 1928, and as recently as 2022 (All Quiet on the Western Front).