The nominations for the 83rd Golden Globe Awards turned out to be largely predictable, occasionally shocking and above all wildly international on Monday morning.
They were predictable because in category after category, the favorites scored nominations from the 399 global critics who now make up the voting body of the Globes. You couldn’t really say that there was a single surprise in the Best Motion Picture – Drama category (“Frankenstein,” “Hamnet,” “It Was Just an Accident,” “The Secret Agent,” “Sentimental Value” and “Sinners”) or in four of the six acting categories.
That’s particularly true in the male actor categories, where the guys who went in as favorites – Michael B. Jordan, Joel Edgerton, Timothée Chalamet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Stellan Skarsgård, Benicio del Toro — came out as nominees.
Oh, sure, Emily Blunt for “The Smashing Machine” was a mild surprise in supporting actress, where she grabbed a spot that could have gone to Gwyneth Paltrow for “Marty Supreme,” Wunmi Mosaku for “Sinners” or Regina Hall for “One Battle After Another.” And Eva Victor (“Sorry, Baby”) wasn’t expected to make it into the Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama category over, say, Sydney Sweeney for “Christy” or Jodie Foster for “A Private Life.”
But the real shock came in the Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy category, where the nominees did not include “Wicked: For Good,” “Jay Kelly,” “Song Sung Blue” or “Wake Up: Dead Man.” Instead, voters found room for not one but two largely under-the-radar (but, by the way, quite good) Richard Linklater movies, “Blue Moon” and “Nouvelle Vague.”
The second of those Linklater films may be entirely emblematic of the Globes these days, because it is entirely in French, a tribute to director Jean-Luc Godard that is about and was shot in the style of that iconic director’s 1960s masterpiece “Breathless.” Though it’s made by a director from Texas, it is for all intents and purposes a purposefully international movie – and while the group that hands out the Golden Globes dropped the word foreign from its former name, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, it is now an international organization, with the vast majority of its nearly 400 voters based overseas.
Instead of being a small cadre of full- and part-time journalists who write for international publications but live and work in Los Angeles, as the HFPA was, the Globes is now a much larger and much more scattered group of critics from around the world, and its choices absolutely reflected that.
Fully half of the six nominees in the marquee category, Best Motion Picture – Drama, were in languages other than English: “Sentimental Value” is Norwegian (and some English), “It Was Just an Accident” is Iranian and “The Secret Agent” is Brazilian. Two of the nominees in Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy were “Nouvelle Vague,” in French, and “No Other Choice,” in Korean.
And all through the film categories, non-English movies made their strongest showing ever. Five actors were nominated for performances not in English: Wagner Moura, Renate Reinsve and Lee Byung-hun in lead and Skarsgård and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas in supporting. And the two most-nominated international films, “Sentimental Value” and “It Was Just an Accident,” also earned spots in the Best Director and Best Screenplay categories.
Of the 15 film categories, the only ones that contain nothing but English-language nominees are Cinematic and Box Office Achievement, a category designed to spotlight movies that prospective viewers might have seen, along with Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy and Best Original Song.
That’s not a bad thing, mind you: At a time when the movie business is reeling, international filmmakers are indeed producing some of the most vital cinema to be found, and in that sense, this year’s Golden Globe nominations are a respectable overview of the state of 2025’s movies, without much evidence of the voters chasing after stars the way the old HFPA often seemed to do.
The TV nominations were a different story, because they had to be: U.S. programs are eligible, so U.S. (and U.K.) programs were nominated, with only a handful of new shows (“Pluribus,” “All Her Fault,” “The Girlfriend”) breaking into the expected lineup of nominees from “The White Lotus,” “The Studio,” “The Pitt,” “Only Murders in the Building.”
But it’s in the film categories where the changes in the Globes have really played out, and where the results of its years-long reclamation project are coming in, and still inconclusive.
Of course, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has been doing something similar in its Oscar nominations in recent years. AMPAS came by its increasingly large segment of non-U.S. voters as it tried to become more diverse in the wake of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy; the Globes did it in an attempt to save an organization that was reeling from an industry boycott over its insular nature and rampant corruption. If the Oscars’ change was incremental over a number of years, the Globes’ makeover has come more quickly, born out of a desperation to appear more credible.
And if that credibility comes at the price of having hit films (or presumed hit films) like “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” “F1,” “KPop Demon Hunters” and “Wicked: For Good” competing mostly in the silly three-year-old Cinematic and Box Office Achievement category, so be it. If it means that an indie distributor like Neon, which specializes in international films, picks up more nominations than Warner Bros. or Netflix, you smile and hope they’ll buy some tables at the Beverly Hilton.
If you’re fighting for an organization’s survival, you do what you have to do.
Sometimes, it seems, even the Golden Globes’ surprises are predictable.
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