The Golden Globes’ long history of scandal – from lawsuits to freebies
It’s amazing to many that the Golden Globes still exist. This most crackpot of film awards organisations were last nearly cancelled into extinction in 2021, after a slew of outrageous scandals and PR gaffes. The fact that they limp on in any form is down to an expensive rebrand after that annus horribilis, and the willingness of America’s TV networks to keep letting them apologetically grace prime time, despite the fact that their ratings peaked in 2004.
What’s perhaps even more amazing is that the Globes have been going since 1944 – that’s right, for 80 years now – when the Hollywood Foreign Correspondent Association, as it was then known, decided in its infancy to hand out prizes to their favourite films of the past year. Over the decades, this became a shameless glad-handing exercise, seized upon by publicists to grease the wheels for Oscar campaigns. The organisation behind the Globes was redubbed the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (hereafter HFPA) in 1955, a name that stuck until 2023.
From day one, it was clear that a certain ethos of mutual back-scratching held sway among HFPA voters, who for many years capped their numbers to the high double figures. The largest membership they’ve ever had is the current 310 – all journalists – compared with 9,905 Oscar voters drawn from all over the industry. Sometimes the whiff of scandal became so obvious that the ceremony fell into dispute.
But it would always make a comeback, it appears for the simple reason that film studios found it advantageous – as a frothy, hype-friendly staging post before the more serious pedigree of the Academy Awards. Think of the Globes, then, as the useful idiot of awards season: if this weren’t the case, there’s no way they could ever have survived so long.
1958: Ex-president Henry Gris resigns because of ‘fixed’ voting
As Variety reported in March 1958, the Latvian-born Henry Gris, who was the HFPA’s first ever president, caused a storm that year by abruptly resigning from the board. His explanation was that “certain awards were being given more or less as favours”.
The current president, Fred Porges, denied any such behaviour. Scrutinising that year’s winners, you wouldn’t suspect any shenanigans – David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai swept the drama categories, and would go on to be the Oscar champ, too.
But perhaps the multiple wins for George Cukor’s musical flop Les Girls, starring joint Best Actress winners Taina Elg and Kay Kendall, might have raised eyebrows, as might the “most glamorous” Special Achievement award for Zsa Zsa Gabor.
1968: The FCC issue broadcast ban for ‘misleading’ the public
The Globes were taken off air after 1968 following scrutiny from the Federal Communications Commission, who decided that the public were being misled about how the awards were decided upon. The film critic Rex Reed, in a mocking report, described that year’s NBC broadcast as so craven and shambolic that it “had to be seen to be believed”.
The FCC investigation found that the HFPA pressured nominees to attend the ceremony, by threatening to give the winner’s Globe to a losing rival who had bothered to come. The FCC’s ban lasted until 1974, when NBC picked up the rights again… for the time being.
1982: ‘New Star of the Year’ winner Pia Zadora causes NBC to pull out
Everyone’s heads swivelled back towards Globes voting practices in 1982, when 28-year-old Pia Zadora, a former child actress on Broadway, managed to scoop an award for “Best New Star in a Motion Picture” for the critically derided crime drama Butterfly.
Co-starring Stacy Keach and Orson Welles, the film had been financed by Zadora’s then-husband, the 58-year-old Israeli multimillionaire Meshulam Riklis, and got terrible reviews, with the New York Times critic Vincent Canby describing her performance as “spectacularly inept”. At the third ever Razzies that March, she would win both Worst Actress and Worst New Star.
Yet the Globes would have none of this negging, and crowned her their new favourite, over such esteemed rivals as Kathleen Turner in Body Heat and Elizabeth McGovern in Ragtime.
It was subsequently suggested that this had something to do with Riklis flying HFPA voters to his casino, the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, and inviting them to private, catered screenings of Butterfly at his house.
The prize certainly gave that impression, coming months after Riklis’s big promotional splurge had also landed his young wife on the cover of Playboy. Riklis died in 2019 but Zadora has always denied any chicanery.
She would later remember the “quiet shock” of the room when she won, and Sally Field mouthing her name to her seat neighbour. “I know that Rik [her nickname for Riklis] did not buy it,” Zadora insisted in a 2015 Hollywood Reporter interview. “There was just an energy in the room – they liked me!”. The furore, though, was embarrassing enough that NBC decided they wanted nothing to do with the Globes the following year, and the show went into syndication.
1996: NBC boosts Globes into a ratings golden age, but consternation mounts
The Globes managed a superficially scandal-free couple of decades until the ignominy of recent years. In 1996, NBC re-acquired the broadcast rights, after a period when TBS had been showing it: the aim was to compete with CBS, who had the Emmys, and ABC, who had the Oscars.
It worked. The ratings swiftly quintupled, and the show became quite a cash grab. NBC would start to net about $50m in ad sales from the broadcast every year.
In 1997, the Globes gave Best Actress (Comedy/Musical) to Madonna for Evita – a somewhat overenthusiastic gesture, which looked cringey when she failed to be Oscar-nominated. The same year, they upset absolutely no one by giving Tom Cruise his second Globe, for Best Actor (Comedy/Musical) in Jerry Maguire. Only later (see below) would this come back to bite them.
If there was ever a golden age of the Golden Globes, it was debatably from 1996-2004. Tellingly, this coincided with the pushiest awards campaigns of the past generation, thanks in large part to Harvey Weinstein and his notoriously bullish tactics as chief of Miramax. Weinstein milked the Globes relentlessly to gain Oscar traction. Take 2002, when Miramax managed to swipe 19 Globes nominations, for the likes of Chicago, In the Bedroom and Gangs of New York.
In 2005, ratings abruptly plummeted. While it’s tempting to blame this on the HFPA’s laughable decision to nominate The Phantom of the Opera for Best Comedy/Musical that year, the same downturn actually affected almost all ceremonies, as public appetite for watching film awards simply seemed to have peaked.
Dec 2010: Burlesque and The Tourist nominated for Best Picture
2010 brought a roster of Globes nominations for the ages – and not in a good way. Burlesque and The Tourist were nominated for Best Comedy/Musical, despite being critical punching bags. Both Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie got nods for the latter; so did Michael Douglas for Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.
Impeccable taste has never been a Globes priority, so this could easily have been written off as classic eccentricity, if it weren’t for what emerged: Sony, the studio behind both Burlesque and The Tourist, had really pushed the boat out. They reportedly flew members of the HFPA on an all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas, with luxury hotel accommodation, free meals, and a private concert performed by Cher, presumably featuring every last one of her songs from Burlesque.
Adding to the embarrassment of this nominations slate was a lawsuit launched just three days before the January 2011 ceremony by Michael Russell, a publicist who claimed he was improperly sacked the year before. His claim for $2m in damages alleged “unethical and potentially illegal activities” which “perpetuated a fraud on the public”. His statement claimed that HFPA members “abuse[d] their positions and engage[d] in unethical and potentially unlawful deals and arrangements which amount to a ‘payola’ scheme.” The HFPA counter-sued, but eventually made an undisclosed settlement with Russell in 2013.
2014: Gary Oldman (post-snub) calls the Globes ‘90 nobodies having a w--k’
One actor who once professed having no use for the Globes – especially after they snubbed him for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in 2011 – is Gary Oldman. In an expletive-ridden 2014 interview with Playboy, he weighed in: “It’s a meaningless event. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association is kidding you that something’s happening. They’re f______ ridiculous. There’s nothing going on at all. It’s 90 nobodies having a w__k. Everybody’s getting drunk, and everybody’s sucking up to everybody. Boycott the f______ thing. Just say we’re not going to play this silly game with you anymore.”
Oldman got back into the game rather quickly. He’d find a use for the Globes – quelle surprise – on the conveyor belt to Oscars glory. By the time he tearily accepted Best Actor for Darkest Hour in 2018, his feelings towards the HFPA certainly seemed to have mellowed (and he would be nominated again in 2020 for Mank).
2018: Brendan Fraser accuses HFPA president Philip Berk of groping him
This one came from left field. Several years before his career comeback moment with The Whale, Fraser gave a long and searching interview to GQ about his post-stardom years. In it, he alleged that Philip Berk, the South Africa-born journalist who had been president of the HFPA for eight years, had groped him at a 2003 luncheon in Beverly Hills. He said the incident had left him on the verge of tears, and contributed in a major way to his retreat from the limelight.
Berk called Fraser’s account “a total fabrication” and said he’d intended a joke rather than a sexual advance. But he also acknowledged, while admitting no wrongdoing, that he’d written a letter of apology to Fraser. This wouldn’t be the last of this saga (see 2022).
Dec 2020: Accusations of anti-Asian racism because of category rules
Just prior to the explosive year of 2021, a mini-scandal, by way of a run-up. Because of some arcane voting rules, the HFPA decided to disallow a pair of films, Minari and The Farewell, from competing in the Best Film categories, consigning them only to Best Foreign Film. In Minari’s case, because the film had an American setting and production team, this attracted a particularly damning backlash. But it was just a foreshock compared with the earthquake to follow.
Feb 2021: Globes blasted after discovery that they had no black members; industry-wide boycott begins
The year after George Floyd’s death was a time of racial reckoning in America, and a particularly bad time to be part of an 87-strong organisation without a single black member. It was preliminarily noted that none of the season’s black-led ensemble films – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Judas and the Black Messiah, One Night in Miami and Da 5 Bloods – had managed to crack the Best Picture categories, despite the doubly-wide net the Globes have over the Oscars. Meanwhile, Sia’s extremely white directorial debut, the bizarre and borderline-offensive Music, succeeded where they all failed.
Over in the TV nominations, Michaela Coel’s hugely acclaimed I May Destroy You got similarly blanked, while Netflix managed to score a pair of nominations for the infamously vapid Emily in Paris – a coup that was widely accredited to the streamer flying voters over for a set visit while the show was filming, and putting them up in Parisian hotel rooms that cost upwards of ￡1,000 per night.
Off the back of these embarrassments, a week before the ceremony on February 28, the Los Angeles Times ran a blistering, 5000-word exposé that dragged the HFPA into an unforgiving spotlight. It focused not only on the organisation’s lack of diversity, but impugned their professional qualifications and accounting practices, finding that the income of many members was being improperly subsidised, despite the not-for-profit nature of the enterprise.
Time’s Up launched a protest campaign on February 26 to protest the racial make-up of the HFPA. Actors who chimed in on social media included Kerry Washington, Sterling K. Brown, Amy Schumer, Simon Pegg, America Ferrera, Mark Duplass, Dakota Johnson and Laura Dern. “We must have Black journalists in our organization,” responded the HFPA’s vice-president, Helen Hoehne, in a 40-second address during the broadcast.
It took a year for the fallout from all this to be entirely absorbed and for the HFPA to commit to a programme of changes. They hired a diversity advisor in March, the same month that over 100 PR firms pressed for reform in an open letter, threatening an industry-wide boycott.
April 2021: Philip Berk expelled after allegedly calling Black Lives Matter a “racist hate movement”
Philip Berk, the same ex-president accused of groping Brendan Fraser, was thrown out of the HFPA on April 21, after sending a group-wide email in which he reportedly described Black Lives Matter as “a racist hate movement”. The same email also slammed the co-found of the group, Patrisse Cullors, as a “self-proclaimed trained Marxist”, and criticised her for buying a house in Topanga Canyon. Berk had been part of the organization for 44 years.
This led crisis expert Judy Smith (the inspiration for the TV show Scandal) to cut ties with the Globes. According to the Hollywood Reporter, she “grew increasingly frustrated by the organization’s refusal to listen to other advice and commit to concrete actions, ultimately concluding that its problems are so deep-rooted that it is a lost cause, which led her to quit.”
May 2021: NBC cancels the broadcast (again); Tom Cruise sends his trophies back
“Now is the time to step up and right the wrongs of the past,” Tom Cruise declared, when he returned the three Golden Globes he’d received, for Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire and Magnolia. “Honestly, as a recent winner of a Golden Globe, I cannot feel proud or happy about being a recipient of this award.”
This was a day after NBC cancelled their broadcast of the 2022 ceremony. The ratings had dropped by more than 60% for 2021 in the wake of all the controversy. “We continue to believe that the HFPA is committed to meaningful reform,” NBC said in a statement. “However, change of this magnitude takes time and work, and we feel strongly that the HFPA needs time to do it right.”
Even after the HFPA board had met on May 6 and approved a programme for so-called “sweeping” reforms, new boycotts continued to roll in, including from Netflix and Amazon Studios.
And further Hollywood stars were moved to reminisce on their bad history with the organisation. Scarlett Johansson issued the following statement:
“In the past, [attending press conferences] has often meant facing sexist questions and remarks by certain HFPA members that bordered on sexual harassment. It is the exact reason why I, for many years, refused to participate in their conferences. The HFPA is an organization that was legitimized by the likes of Harvey Weinstein to amass momentum for Academy recognition, and the industry followed suit.”
The 2022 ceremony was therefore not televised at all, had no red carpet, and was devoid of stars or cameras. The winners were announced in real-time in badly formatted tweets, eliciting online derision.
Nov 2022: Brendan Fraser refuses to attend
After renegotiations, NBC made a one-year agreement to re-broadcast the ceremony in Jan 2023, which was hosted by Jerrod Carmichael. (“I’m here because I’m black,” his opening monologue conceded.) But there was one guaranteed no-show. Despite his front-runner nomination for Best Actor (Drama) in The Whale, Brendan Fraser had no intention of turning up.
“I have more history with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association than I have respect for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association,” Fraser told GQ in a cover story. “I will not participate. It’s because of the history that I have with them. And my mother didn’t raise a hypocrite. You can call me a lot of things, but not that.”
Despite going on to win the Oscar, Fraser was predictably not the favourite choice of Globes voters that year, who gave their award to Austin Butler for Elvis instead.
June 2023: HFPA abolished; acquired by Dick Clark productions and rebranded to Golden Globe Foundation
On June 12 2023, it was curtains for the HFPA. They sold the Golden Globes to Dick Clark Productions, the TV company who had stepped in from 1983 to produce the show. While HFPA members – who had increased in number to 310 after the diversity drive – would continue to vote on the awards, the Globes were now effectively owned by the two parent companies of Dick Clark Productions, Penske Media Corporation and Eldridge Industries, overseen by two billionaire businessmen, Jay Penske and Todd Boehly.
Between them, the companies publish Variety, Rolling Stone, Deadline Hollywood, Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, and many other titles. (Boehly is also a major investor in A24, the film studio responsible for 2025 Golden Globe favourite The Brutalist.) Their move to turn the Globes from a non-profit into a very-much-for-profit organisation was rapid – and helped by better Nielsen ratings for the Jan 2024 ceremony. They managed to go 50 per cent up on 2023, even though the host, Jo Koy, was an infamous flop.
Nov 2024: Sidelined ex-HFPA members threaten lawsuit against new billionaire owners
No awards season would be complete now without another Globes mess hitting the headlines – to date, the latest one. Puck’s Matt Belloni first reported in September that the Penske-owned Variety had been pitching studios on “a series of intimate, curated dinners” with Golden Globes voters.
For a low six figure price, studios could pay for a panel conversation with awards contenders, followed by an “upscale dining experience with a guest list of 30-40 voters,” all “in collaboration with the Golden Globes.” None of the trade press reported on this. It is now reported in the Ankler that though the sale was announced in June 2023, the deal has supposedly yet to be completed. It has been thrown into new turmoil by a letter filed to the California Attorney General’s office by an anonymous group of HFPA members, asking the Attorney General to reconsider the group’s acquisition by Penske/Eldridge.
The 12-page letter asks the Attorney General to “stay the pending dissolution of the HFPA to give us time to evaluate and pursue any and all legal rights that are implicated by this unfortunate series of events”, adding, “we believe numerous issues exist that invalidate the purchase agreement.”
The Golden Globes will be going ahead, as usual, on Jan 5. Just don’t ask anyone who is legally in charge.
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