Golden Globe Predictions: Can Barbenheimer and New Voters Save the Show?

By Steve Pond

The stakes have rarely been higher for the Golden Globes. Not for the movies that are in contention for those shiny, clunky statuettes – the Globes has always been a pretty low-stakes contest, where you can relax because it doesn’t really matter who wins.

But for the organization that puts on the Globes, Sunday night’s ceremony will be enormously important. The past year has seen a wholesale reorganization that turned the awards and its governing body from a nonprofit enterprise to a for-profit one, in the process doing away with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the curious organization that had been handing out the awards since it began in 1944.

A newly enlarged body of voters, about 300 people from around the world instead of the 80-90 Los Angeles-based journalists for foreign outlets who used to cast ballots, must come up with a respectable slate of winners and persuade Hollywood to keep showing up. And the show must also attract viewers in its first year on CBS after more than 60 years on NBC, which dropped the show after the HFPA came under fire for ethical lapses and a lack of diversity.

As recently as 2020, the Globes got 18.3 million viewers, but things have been catastrophic since then: The 2021 ceremony, delayed because of COVID, dropped all the way down to 6.9 million. The 2022 show was a private affair with no guests, no broadcast and no rating. And last year, in what was supposed to be the first step back, the ceremony began with host Jerrod Carmichael savaging the HFPA and drew a paltry 6.3 million viewers.

So this year, they need to establish credibility, but also draw enough viewers to make financial sense for CBS or some other broadcaster that can maintain their high profile. The two most-nominated films are the two halves of the Barbenheimer phenomenon, “Barbie” with nine noms and “Oppenheimer” with eight, and that can’t hurt. Neither can the fact that the CBS lead-in to the Globes telecast will be one of three NFL football games, though the Bears v. Packers option is the only one with any playoff implications.

Still, 10 million viewers seems about the minimum for a true recovery, and that also seems pretty unlikely.

In a way, though, the ratings were out of the voters’ hands once they did their duty by nominating the hits. Coming up with a solid group of winners will be easier, with this year’s nominations giving them strong contenders to choose from in most categories.

And the makeup of this year’s voters is different, to the point where the usual questions that critics used to ask when trying to predict the winners (Who posed for the most selfies with HFPA members? Which studio was most generous with gifts?) are no longer germane.

About a quarter of this year’s Golden Globe voters are former members of the HFPA, which means the old voters are vastly outnumbered. More than a third of the voters are based in or write for outlets in Europe, a roughly equal number in Central and South America and Canada and a smaller portion spread across Africa, Asia and Australia.

That makes this an entirely different voting body, one that in certain ways is more representative of the Academy, which has grown increasingly international. (In other ways, of course, it’s still nothing like the Academy.)   

If my suspicions about what movies will be nominated by Oscar voters is correct, this will be the first year since the Academy expanded its Best Picture category in 2009 that every one of the top Oscar nominees will have been previously nominated at the Globes – though that synchronicity would be more impressive if the Globes hadn’t expanded its categories to six nominees each, essentially providing 12 best-pic nominees for the Oscars to choose from.

(For the record, I’m guessing that the Oscar Best Picture category will consist of all six Globes nominees for dramatic motion picture – “Anatomy of a Fall,” “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Maestro,” “Oppenheimer,” “Past Lives” and “The Zone of Interest” – plus the Globes comedy nominees “American Fiction,” “Barbie,” “The Holdovers” and “Poor Things.”)

Given the dramatic shift to voters based outside the United States, it’s realistic to think that the non-English films could show unexpected strength when winners are announced. The French film “Anatomy of a Fall,” which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes, could be a true contender to win the drama prize over more U.S.-focused dramas like “Oppenheimer” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and its lead actress, Sanda Hüller, could be a real threat to pull off an upset in the Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama category.

The television categories, meanwhile, are even more confusing than usual, since it’s hard to imagine that the 200-plus voters based outside the U.S. are aficionados of American TV. And while previous Globes voters always seemed to be looking for new shows to reward, can that possibly be the case in a year that saw the end of an awards juggernaut like “Succession?”

To see this year’s Golden Globes predictions, click here or the button below.