75th Golden Globe Awards

For the first time in almost 40 years, a musical wins both the Golden Globe and the Academy Award as the best film of the year. The previous winner: The Sound of Music.

The Hollywood Foreign Press embraced Baz Luhrmann’s one-of-a-kind musical like no other, and their support catapulted the movie to box office heights and an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. The film had many adherents among them Robert Wise and Stanley Donen, who proclaimed that director Luhrmann had reinvented the Hollywood musical.

All in all, it was a good night for the Aussies: Russell Crowe won his Golden Globe for Best Actor – Drama for A Beautiful Mind, Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge triumphed as Best Musical or Comedy and was good for a Best Actress – Comedy Globe for Nicole Kidman as well. Directed by Ron Howard, A Beautiful Mind tells the story of Princeton mathematician John Nash (Crowe), who won a Nobel Prize for Economics after years of struggling with schizophrenia.

Ridley Scott's Gladiator revamped the sword-and-sandal epic genre of a past era in Hollywood and cemented Russell Crowe as an international superstar and sex-symbol. It was basically a revenge story in ancient Rome: when Roman General Maximus is betrayed by Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), he is forced into a painful exile, and eventually returns to Rome as a gladiator and seeks vengeance with all his might.

A new millennium and a new force in filmdom.  Dreamworks, a studio created only a few years back by Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg would go on to win three consecutive best picture Golden Globes and Academy Awards.

After three tries Pixar finally won a Golden Globe! It was a feat not to be repeated until 2007 when the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (and the Academy) established a new category: Best Animated Feature, which Pixar then went on to win five years in a row. Toy Story 2 was a sequel that many thought was even better than the first.

A satire of American middle-class notions of beauty and personal satisfaction, and the consecration of Kevin Spacey as a great American actor, American Beauty is the story of a sexually frustrated suburban father, directed by Sam Mendes and written by Alan Ball. It was the only Globe-winning drama in the entire 90s to not be a period piece.

Following the Golden Globe nominee Force Majeure, Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund presents his latest work, The Square, which was awarded the Palme d’Or at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. The film, which also features Elisabeth Moss and Dominic West, is now competing as Sweden’s submission for the foreign-language Golden Globe Award.

Montreal might turn 350 in the minds of most Canadians, but French-Canadian director François Girard's Hochelaga, Land of Souls shows that the history of their land is much more complex than that. The opening of the film shows the aftermath of a 13th-century battle in which many Natives died.

Andrea Bocelli might be blind, but this did not prevent him from becoming one of the greatest singers in the world. His autobiographical novel The Music of Silence has now been adapted to the screen by British director Michael Radford.