What Happened to the Golden Globes and How Uncertain Is Its Future?

The award ceremonies generate less and less emotion among viewers and the crisis is latent in the rating, which year after year decreases. The organization that has paid the most consequences has been the Golden Globes, which since last year has faced a series of scandals.

The statuette awarded at these awards is, along with the Oscars and the Emmys, one of the most coveted for those involved in the audiovisual industry. What they have in common is that there are fewer and fewer viewers interested in watching the protocol of the ceremonies that are held year after year.

This Monday, it was announced that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA for its acronym in English) is dissolved. This organization was in charge of delivering the Golden Globe Awards, and the ceremony will now be carried out by Dick Clark Productions.

What Led to the End of the HFPA?

The first thing to keep in mind is that the HFPA is a non-profit organization created in 1944. In recent years, its committee has been around more than 90 members, who were in charge of delivering the awards.

The debacle began with an investigation carried out by the LA Times into the HFPA during 2021. One of the scandals that caused the most controversy was a series of bribes that this organization allegedly received from recording studios for their productions to achieve award nominations. The other scandal that also caught the attention of the public was that, of the almost hundred members, none were black. This sparked criticism around the lack of diversity in the committee in charge of delivering the Golden Globes.

Finally, the multiple controversies that Philip Berk, former president of the HFPA, starred in, added to the above. He was accused by Brendan Fraser of sexually abusing him in 2003. In addition, the LA Times investigation found emails in which the manager called the Black Lives Matter movement a hate group. The crisis simply snowballed until this year forced the end of the association.

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Crisis With Live Ceremonies

The Golden Globes scandal affected his ratings so much that its most recent ceremony barely surpassed the 2008 press conference in which they announced that there was no ceremony that year. For that occasion there was, as in this year, a writers' strike and that put pressure on the cancellation.

The 2021 ceremony, without the latent scandal, had almost 19 million viewers, in contrast to the almost 7 million who watched the ceremony in 2022. The drama of the situation is that the rating numbers have continued to decline since then. However, this crisis is not exclusive to the Golden Globes.

In the case of the Grammys, they have not been able to come close to the 2012 figure that touched 40 million viewers. On that occasion there was a fight between Adele, Kanye West, Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars and Rihanna for the massive harvest of awards. For the last three years, the Grammys have barely surpassed 10 million viewers.

With the Oscars, there has been a slight recovery from the steady decline in numbers since 2014. This problem has caused those in charge of entertaining during the ceremony to invent new ways to entertain for a generation more prone to immediacy and the compressed, in which TikTok is the preferred social network. That will be the first challenge for Dick Clark Productions, which receives the broadcast rights to the Golden Globe.

What Will Happen to the Golden Globes?

At the moment, it is not the end of the awards. It is expected that with the new owners, there will be a transformation process that will restore the trust of the spectators. Todd Boehly, owner of Dick Clark Productions, spoke of evolution for the awards. Very surely with this will come more diversity in the committee that nominates the productions and more dynamics in the ceremonies.

The transaction for the rights to broadcast the ceremony will go to the new Golden Globe Foundation, which will be a charitable fund to promote the entertainment industry. Next year's ceremony is already scheduled to be on January 7 and the expectation hangs over the news that the organization will offer.