“La La Land” won the prize for best musical or
comedy film at the 74th Golden Globes on Sunday, sweeping seven
awards categories and emerging as the night’s top winner.
Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone with their awards
Director Damian Chazelle’s musical romance stars Emma Stone and Ryan
Gosling as striving artists in love in Los Angeles.
Gosling and Stone took both lead acting prizes for the comedy or
musical category. “La La Land” also won best screenplay, score and
song, and best director for Chazelle.
“Moonlight,” director Barry Jenkins’ coming-of-age story about an
African-American boy in Florida, won best drama – the most coveted
prize at the awards which split top prizes into drama and musical or
comedy categories.
Isabelle Huppert (“Elle”) and Casey Affleck (“Manchester by the Sea”)
won lead acting awards in the drama category.
Paul Verhoeven’s rape drama “Elle” took the prize for best
foreign-language film, and television series “Atlanta,” “The Crown”
and “The People vs OJ Simpson – American Crime Story” won television
awards.
But “La La Land’s” clean sweep of all the prizes for which it was
nominated made it the star of the show – starting with emcee Jimmy
Fallon’s opening musical number, which parodied the film’s
fantastical, classic movie-musical-style dance scenes, ending with a
pas de deux between Fallon and Justin Timberlake.
Accepting the best picture award, “La La Land” producer Fred Berger
acknowledged the long odds on making a successful movie musical, a
genre that reached its peak in the 1940s, in the 21st century.
Berger thanked the film’s backers “for dismissing all conventional
wisdom and jumping off a cliff with us to make this movie.”
The evening’s spotlight turned to politics as well, coming fewer than
two weeks before the inauguration of Donald Trump as US president.
Fallon’s opening monologue took a jab at the contentious US
presidential election, calling the Golden Globes “one of the few
places left where America still honours the popular vote” a reference
to Trump’s victory under the US electoral college system despite
winning millions fewer votes than Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Eight-time Golden Globe winner Meryl Streep, who received this year’s
Cecil B DeMille lifetime achievement award, used her spotlight to
chastise Trump for a performance she said “stunned” her – the
incoming US president’s mockery of a disabled reporter during a
campaign rally.
She called for Hollywood to celebrate and defend diversity, pointing
out that “Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners, and if
we kick them all out, you will have nothing to watch but football and
mixed martial arts.”
First awarded in 1944, the Golden Globes honour the best in
television and film across more than 25 categories at a gala dinner
in Beverly Hills.
While the jury consists of the about 100 relatively unknown members
of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the awards punch above
their weight, drawing the third-largest global audience among awards
shows after the Oscars and the Grammys.
The Globes’ top film winners often coincide with the Academy Awards,
and are seen across the industry as a sneak preview of possible Oscar
nominees and winners.
