Golden Globes are worthless, embarrassing trinkets – every winner should give theirs back

What is the literal worth of a Golden Globe? The controversy surrounding the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which is now building to an industry-wide boycott after NBC cancelled next year’s broadcast, has put the question into relief. Elsewhere, you can read all about the corruption, the scandals, the epic diversity failings, the ratings plummets, and the studios and stars who want the whole organisation off their lawn.

But what is a Globe, in itself, worth to anyone? This is at the bottom of the problem. And it’s relative. If you are Marilyn Monroe, the answer is: not much, these days. Monroe was actually gifted three Golden Globes, but only one of these was for a specific performance: Best Actress (Comedy or Musical) for Some Like it Hot in 1960.

The other two were so called “Henrietta” awards for “World Favourite Female”, in 1954 and 1962. If these sound like fairly gratuitous honours which might have encouraged Monroe simply to show up for those ceremonies, that’s exactly what they were – bonus prizes, determined annually from a Reuters survey of the general public until 1980, when they were dropped.

The latter of these made history in 2018 when it became the highest-selling Golden Globe at auction, netting $250,000. This is very much top-end, in terms of Globe value. The main point being: it has Marilyn Monroe’s name on it. And it rather proves the thesis that the Globes, to cling on to any sense of cachet, needed the likes of Monroe much more than she ever needed them.

Over her brief career, she put up with a lot of photoshoots at such events as the price of stardom, and we all know exactly how much those took their toll. The value of a Globe as an award given to Monroe is almost infinitely greater than that of an unengraved trophy – you could almost say the recipient did these awards a huge favour in bothering to accept them.

Ask Tom Cruise. He’s also the winner of three Globes – all three of his competitive, for Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire and Magnolia. Or at least he was, until he gave them back earlier this week, adding his voice to the list of protests about the HFPA’s unenlightened membership policies and aura of sleaze.

Each time he won, Cruise’s Globes seemed like moderately big news for a week or two, until he was Oscar-nominated for all three of those performances and lost (to Daniel Day-Lewis for My Left Foot; Geoffrey Rush for Shine; and Michael Caine for The Cider House Rules). Being Tom Cruise, he might have been able to flog them off for a buck or two.

But giving them back makes a different point: they’re quite embarrassing. Their principal value was always temporary – as bargaining chips in awards season, paid for by who knows what under-the-table arrangements between studios, publicists and the HFPA themselves.

When he received the first one in 1990, Cruise made a speech about it being a “huge acknowledgement”, helping to legitimise his career shift to a leading man everyone was starting to take more seriously. By the second and third, he seemed surprised and even sheepish to be on stage. It was almost as if the value of each Globe was undercut by the HFPA eagerly bestowing another on him at every opportunity.

For Cruise to send them back is a clear stand against this cuddling-up-to-the-stars ethos that has made the Globes an industry joke for years: no one wants to be the butt of that joke, three times. Meryl Streep, who has amassed a grand total of nine, should also take note.

The other most high-profile Globes dissenter among Hollywood’s A-list has been Scarlett Johansson, who has never yet won one, but has been nominated five times, including for a film called A Love Song for Bobby Long (2004), which no one has seen or heard about ever since. It’s not hard to intuit her own embarrassment at being dragged into the ceremony as a prime reason for calling out this cringefest. To be overcelebrated because of your fame, and thrust into awards season’s glare for films no one even cares about: first world problems of a very ScarJo kind. But there’s no good reason why she should have to play along.

Gary Oldman once famously called the Golden Globes “90 nobodies having a wank”. In an expletive-ridden 2014 interview with Playboy, the full quote continued: “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. 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.”

Notably, this was before Oldman’s recent run of awards success, and after they’d snubbed him for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in 2011. His feelings towards the Globes had strikingly mellowed by the time he tearily accepted Best Actor for Darkest Hour in 2018 (and he was again nominated this year for Mank).

Once more, with feeling – the Globes are useless, so you can denigrate them till kingdom come, until they’re useful, which is specifically during a brief window of awards season when you, your publicists, and the studio backing your film want the heat turned up.

And then it’s over, everyone cools off, and no one cares about the Golden Globes at all, and can safely go back to calling them a complete disgrace. If you happen to have won one, or nine, you probably hide them in the back of a cupboard to stop yourself going beetroot when guests are round. Maybe Cruise was having a general purge, and didn’t want to clutter the charity shops of Beverly Hills? But there’s also a reason he sent them back in May – and not January.