Golden Globes stay on a starry track

Host Nikki Glaser provided a few gentle barbs in a mostly restrained ceremony.

- ROBERT LLOYD

NIKKI Glaser's hosting duties included a sketch and a musical number.

And it all comes around again. The least meaningful — most meaningless? — of the big Hollywood awards shows, which is to say, among the ones that are shown on broadcast television, the Golden Globes (edition 83, if you can believe it) handed out a passel of trophies Sunday night from a ballroom in the Beverly Hilton Hotel. (The event was broadcast live by CBS and streamed by Paramount+).

As the opening of “awards season,” it’s supposed to be a bellwether of the Oscars race, blah blah blah. But if the world will little note nor long remember who wins these things, except when it's called to their attention by the words “Golden Globe winner” appearing in an article, it means something to the people who get them, and I certainly don’t mean to rain on that parade. There are no nominees undeserving of praise. This is not the age of Pia Zadora.

In their bubble of old-school glamour and gratitude, awards shows presume to display celebrities in the highly-styled, expensively-dressed wild, and, at least in the case of the acceptance speeches, they do, for a minute, do something like that. Sunday night, these moments tended to be sweet, not incendiary, and made one think, “Those picture people really seem quite nice and genuine.” There was, of course, the question of whether or to what degree the show, which is to say the people in it, would address the world outside the Hilton's walls. The last time the Globes rolled around, we were standing on the edge of a cliff; now we're free falling into a seemingly bottomless pit.