On Sunday night, Demi Moore won a best-actress award at the Golden Globes for The Substance. More importantly, maybe, she also gave the kind of accep
On Sunday night, Demi Moore won a best-actress award at the Golden Globes for The Substance. More importantly, maybe, she also gave the kind of acceptance speech that gets people Oscar nominations. The Academy Awards best-actress race is particularly tight this year, with seven or eight actors vying for five coveted spots. Moore’s speech, which was graceful and perfectly pitched emotionally, reminded audiences of her long career and the fact that she may be overdue for these sorts of accolades. “I’ve been doing this a long time, like over 45 years,” she said, “and this is the first time I’ve ever won anything as an actor, and I’m just so humbled and so grateful.”
Several awards publicists and strategists have told Vanity Fair that the main value of the Globes is how wins at this show can influence the awards strategists really care about—the Oscars. This value is meaningful enough that it’s allowed the Globes to recover from a major scandal that called the whole operation into question just a few years ago.
The Golden Globes have taken place in the same spot—the Beverly Hilton—for the past 64 years. Much has changed over that time, of course, but for the majority of their history, the Globes were considered the second most crucial awards show of the year, and a major campaign stop for Oscar contenders. But in 2021, the Golden Globes and the organization behind it—the Hollywood Foreign Press Association—were embroiled in a major scandal when they were criticized for a lack of diversity among their voter body and allegedly unethical behavior.
High-powered publicists demanded change. A-list celebrities called for a boycott and returned their Globes. NBC pulled the plug on the broadcast for the following year. For a moment, it seemed neither the organization nor the show would survive.
But Hollywood’s memory is infamously miniature, and it would be nearly impossible to believe the group that put on the 2025 Golden Globes this past Sunday had been rocked by such a reckoning. The room was packed with A-list actors and rising stars who were there as either nominees or presenters. Everyone took their wins seriously, giving emotional speeches—like Zoe Saldaña, who had tears streaming down her face when she said, “Thank you so much to the Golden Globes for celebrating our film and honoring the women of Emilia Pérez. This is [the] first time for me.”
The press covered the night like any other awards show, with headlines about Emilia Pérez’s substantial wins and the ceremony’s other major surprises. The importance of the Globes and the validity of its picks have been restored. And the ratings—9.3 million viewers—were down just a smidge from the previous year’s 9.4 million, according to Nielsen, so audiences at home are tuning in too. But how did a show that was on the brink of extinction come back so unscathed—besides the fact that it’s an increasingly conservative, self-dealing time in America, when #MeToo and other scandals seem to be receding quickly in the rearview mirror?
Like so much of Hollywood, it’s all a matter of perception. The Globes organization did make notable changes, growing its voter body from 87 members in 2021 to over 300 by 2023. Most of them are professional international journalists who work outside of Los Angeles, with 60% of the group self-identifying as racially and ethnically diverse. The Globes also put modern rules in place, like banning lavish gifts and doing away with HFPA-only press conferences.
After losing NBC (which agreed to put on the 2023 show, but decided not to renew for the following year), the Globes scrambled to find a modern broadcasting partner. CBS signed on, at first only to broadcast the 2024 show. After that went smoothly, the network agreed to a five-year deal beginning with the 2025 telecast.
Solidifying a broadcast partner brought back the show’s relevancy, and Hollywood studios and publicists soon signed on to make sure their talent attended the Globes. It helped that last year’s best-picture winners—awards that went to Oppenheimer and Poor Things—aligned closely with what would eventually happen at the Oscars, which spoke to the modern voting body’s more sedate tastes. The days of random winners (remember Jodie Foster for The Mauritanian and Aaron Taylor Johnson for Nocturnal Animals?) seemed to be behind the Globes.
Most critically, the Globes’ power resides in the fact that the event takes place just days before voting for the Academy Awards kicks off. The show is a key way to catch the attention of Academy voters, who are most likely scrambling to watch everything they need to see before casting a ballot. If a film wins a bunch of awards at the Globes, voters will notice; wins could sway them to check out a film they may have skipped, or consider an actor they were going to overlook.
“If you do what I do for a living, having a bunch of nominations come out in mid-December gives a breath of fresh air, to both TV and film,” says one awards publicist. “No one’s going to tell me that it doesn’t have some impact.”
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