2021 Golden Globes nominations: 5 things to know

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has announced its nominations for the 2021 Golden Globe awards, best known as the only big award show that lets famous people get drunk before they make their speech. 

Critical darlings like The Queen’s Gambit, One Night in Miami, and The Mandalorian got nominations, as did surprising left-fielders like Jason Sudeikis (Ted Lasso) and Jodie Foster (The Mauritanian), so it looks like the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s habit of being wackier than most larger award bodies has yet to break. 

Here are some big takeways from the 2021 Golden Globe nominations:

1. Netflix is killing it; The Crown and Mank tie for most overall nominations.

Every year at the Golden Globes there are a few projects that pull above the rest to garner the most nominations in disparate categories. This year the movie with the most nominations is David Fincher’s Mank, the black-and-white biopic about Herman J. Mankiewicz, screenwriter of Citizen Kane. Mank got six noms — Best Director for David Fincher, acting nods for Gary Oldman and Amanda Seyfried, Best Score, Best Screenplay, and Best Picture – Drama. Good for Mank. 

Unsurprisingly, The Crown is the most nominated TV show of 2021, with nods for Best TV – Drama, and acting nominations for Josh O’Connor, Olivia Coleman, Emma Corrin, Gillian Anderson, and Helena Bonham Carter. Both The Crown and Mank are Netflix streaming exclusives. 

2. Women directors outnumber men for the first time in Golden Globes history 

The category for best director of a motion picture includes three women (Regina King, Chloé Zhao, Emerald Fennell) and two men (David Fincher, Aaron Sorkin), giving women directors a majority of the category for the first time in the history of the Golden Globe awards. Emerald Fennell (who also plays Camilla Parker-Bowles in Globe-nominated Netflix series The Crown) and Chloé Zhao also have the distinction of being first time directors on their films Promising Young Woman and Nomadland, respectively. 

Sorkin and Fincher may be industry constants, but this category could very well go to women in their historical majority. 

3. Oh hey, Hamilton! 

Yeah! Nearly six years after Hamilton premiered on Broadway, Lin-Maniel Miranda’s Pulitzer, Grammy, and Tony–winning musical is nominated for a Best Picture Musical/Comedy Golden Globe award (Miranda himself is also nominated for Best Actor Musical/Comedy). These nominations are for the stage recording of Hamilton that premiered on Disney+ in July 2020. 

Hamilton is eligible for these nominations because the Golden Globes, unlike the Oscars, allows the submission of recorded live performances in their film categories. That rule or loophole has rarely resulted in a nomination, but this is one time Hamilton did not throw away his shot. 

4. Make sure you see these three performances before the Globes.

There are dozens of fantastic performances nominated across multiple categories, but some of them may have slipped the average movie or TV–watcher’s radar this past year. Shira Haas’ leading performance in Netflix’s Unorthodox is a Mashable favorite, and Leslie Odom Jr. ‘s tremendous portrayal of Sam Cooke in One Night in Miami is a frontrunner for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture (Odom Jr. is also nominated for Best Song, since he co-wrote and performed One Night in Miami’s “Speak Now.”). 

Finally, the late Chadwick Boseman is nominated for playing Levee in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. It’s possible the Black Panther actor, who died of colon cancer in 2020, could win a posthumous Globe for his final performance. 

5. Minari’s nomination is proof the Golden Globes needs to update their eligibility requirements for “Foreign Language.” 

If the Globes’ eligibility requirements were less antiquated, Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari could have had a shot at Best Picture. Instead, the film is nominated in Best Picture – Foreign Language, which is an honor unto itself — albeit one that exposes bias in the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s guidelines.  

Lee Isaac Chung is an American director and Minari is a film starring American actors. It takes place in 1980s Arkansas and is for all intents and purposes an American production. Minari is considered a foreign film by the HFPA because most of its dialogue, spoken by immigrant characters, is in Korean. The eligibility rules for Best Picture require most of the dialogue in a movie to be en English, so Minari was disqualified from the top prize. 

Here’s why that’s messed up. The HFPA has changed its rules for this category multiple times, and previous winners under different rules have allowed English language films produced in other countries to compete for what was then called Best Foreign Film. In fact, the most honored country in the history of this category is the United Kingdom for seven English language films. Those rules don’t apply now, but the category’s previous flexibility shows that the HFPA has the capacity to change with the times. 

There is no reason an American film about the American immigrant experience should be considered foreign, or that the presence of a language spoken by millions of Americans should render a film like Minari a “foreign” experience.