Golden Globe Awards

1961’s Golden Globe winner for Best Comedy, The Apartment, was by general consensus the year’s best film. It was also the New York Critics’ and the Academy’s choice and one of the year’s biggest moneymakers.

Spartacus was one of only three films to win Best Picture Drama at the Golden Globes and not receive a Best Picture nomination from the Academy Awards. The other two were East of Eden (1955) and The Cardinal (1963).

The 1960s were by many measures the decade that changed the world– and the movies changed with it. As protests raged against glaring injustice and the younger generations tried to reimagine a better future, the counterculture spilled into the streets and behind the cameras.

The mother of all sword-and-sandals epic movies, Ben-Hur, was fêted grandly at the Golden Globe awards ceremony on March 10, 1960. William Wyler’s 3 hours and 30 minutes film received four Globes (Best Picture Drama, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Stephen Boyd) and many nominations, including one for Best Actor for Charlton Heston, who surprisingly lost to Anthony Franciosa (for Career).

A half-century before the Billy Wilder comedy was acclaimed the best comedy of all time (American Film Institute, BBC poll), the Hollywood Foreign Press Association embraced Some Like It Hot.

It was a spectacular night, that March 5, 1959, at the Ambassador Hotel's Coconut Grove, for the Golden Globe Awards. The Defiant Ones defied expectations by winning Best Picture, Drama (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was also competing, and considered perhaps the favorite coming in).

1959 was a watershed year for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. That’s the year they decided to split the music/comedy award, giving two separate Golden Globes, one to Gigi.

Les Girls.

This epic war drama – Golden Globe for Best Picture Drama of the year in 1958 – became the first Golden Globe Award for British director David Lean: he would go on to win for Lawrence of Arabia (1963) and Doctor Zhivago (1965). Sir Alec Guinness won as Best Actor – Drama; many years later he was nominated by the HFPA for the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars (1977), and one last time for Little Dorrit (1987).

This is the year in which the HFPA started announcing the nominations in advance of the awards. Of the contenders, four were comedies and only one a musical.