Tiresome.
The answer: No, but it might show that the end is nigh nonetheless. Despite having a semi-captive audience for its awards show, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association staged a historic flop on Sunday with its Golden Globes presentation. NBC drew the smallest audience in the entire history of the Golden Globes, losing 64% of its audience from the previous year: The pandemic-era Golden Globes sunk to 6.9 million viewers, down a whopping 64% from 2020 and only barely beating the year when a writer’s strike forced NBC to show a news conference announcing the winners. Last year’s show, in the pre-lockdown era, reached 18.4 million viewers, the Nielsen company said. Big winners in Sunday’s ceremony were the films “Nomadland” and “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” and the television programs “The Crown” and “The Queen’s Gambit.” The writer’s strike curtailed the Globes in 2008 and only 6 million people watched the news conference. Otherwise, this year’s show had by far the smallest audience since NBC began telecasting the awards in 1996. The Associated Press suggests that the low audience could be related to ethics issues at the HFPA, which had gotten blasted in an LA Times exposé that found no black voting members in its selection process. How many people actually read the LA Times, though? Were more than a few hundred thousand at best even aware of these controversies before the show? I doubt that the 11 million potential viewers across the country who tuned in last year and ghosted the Golden Globes this year even knew about these issues, let alone cared enough to boycott over them. That’s why the report also noted the “shuddering sound” coming from other entertainment-industry awards shows, especially ABC and the Academy Awards. That has been postponed until late April, by which time the organizers and network hope to get more in-person participation as COVID-19 vaccines become more plentiful.
