The Golden Globe Awards

It didn’t take long for the Globes to fall prey to the same types of snafus and stumbles we’ve all experienced in the Video Chat Era. ... The telecast was also filled with fantastically awkward and therefore entertaining reaction shots. ... We also had some pretty cool video moments. ... As for the actual awards: There were no great shocks, though it was a definite upset when Andra Day won (deservedly so) for “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” and a bit of a surprise, at least to Jodie Foster, when she won best supporting actress for “The Mauritanian.”

Fey and Poehler, on different coasts but framed as if on the same stage, delivered their one-liners with their usual warmth, even if the goofs on the likes of Big Red Carpet (like Big Pharma) and “The Prom” were forgettable. ... During Fey and Poehler’s opening bit, the producers flashed to the Zoom feeds of the subjects of many of their jokes — we saw Nicole Kidman having to laugh at a joke about her wig and coats in “The Undoing,” for example, a few seconds after the punchline due to a lag. It was just clunky, lacking the good-spiritedness of seeing famous people laughing at themselves from the audience.

What was never in question was the wisdom of having Fey and Poehler back as hosts. ... As a party, it was a Zoom call. ... Attempts to make nominees seem as if they were in a shared space, a party space, chatting away with one another as the telecast went to commercial breaks, fell flat.

A lot of the Golden Globes was indeed messy this year, but not necessarily the good kind of messy. ... The electricity usually generated between the pair [Fey and Poehler] and their audience when everyone’s in the same ballroom was notably absent, but nothing about their performance was cringey or embarrassing, which is the bar we have now set for entirely or semi-virtual award shows.

Like a lot of our mediated experiences over the last year, the night begged to be rated on a curve. It was more often fun in a “Good for them for giving it a shot” way. Even with living-room champagne, teleconferencing is still teleconferencing. ... The association acknowledged the racial issue in a perfunctory, we-have-work-to-do statement from the stage. It addressed the self-dealing charges not at all. ... This disjointed version of a usually carefree production felt like it was ailing.

Weak acknowledgements during the ceremony, mostly light jabs from a few presenters, and innumerable technical errors made for a chaotic Golden Globes — in a bad way; in a “It doesn’t seem like they care” way; in a “Did they even rehearse this?” kind of way.

Returning hosts Amy Poehler and Tina Fey did what they could, with Poehler beaming in live from the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles, where the awards are typically held, and Fey broadcasting from the Rainbow Room in New York. Each played to reduced capacity rooms comprised of front line workers in the audience and approximated being onstage together by way of an awkward split screen. But the whole night was a cake with a saggy middle and burnt edges.

Tina and Amy (who represented the West Coast branch of the industry at the Beverly Hilton) did a pretty admirable job for two people co-hosting a primetime telecast from opposite sides of the country. ... [But] A three-hour Zoom meeting with appearances by Elle Fanning and Regina King in evening gowns is, alas, still a three-hour Zoom meeting—which is to say, it’s riddled with technical difficulties and not exactly an escapist treat for a nation with Zoom fatigue.

Nothing in this show was appreciably more innovative than what the Emmys did five-plus months ago, and the Emmys nailed almost every challenge and avoided almost every disaster. The Golden Globes had a Zoom failure on the first award of the night and it basically didn't stop after that.

With the exception of a few highlights, mostly involving returning hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s opening monologue, and touching speeches by Taylor Simone Ledward, accepting a best actor in a motion picture drama award for her late husband, Chadwick Boseman, and Lee Isaac Chung (and his daughter), accepting the best foreign-language film prize for “Minari,” Sunday’s Golden Globe Awards show was a mess.

Baffling production choices like keeping all nominees in major categories onscreen to clap and smile mutely as one gave an acceptance speech, and strange snafus like the deafening background noises drowning out winners like Catherine O’Hara, kept the story on the show rather than its substance. It can’t have been an intentional strategy — who’d choose to create a disaster?

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s bicoastal hosting job was plagued with weird timing mishaps, but they landed several funny jokes in spite of the technical issues. Fonda’s speech accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award was a terrific call for better diversity in Hollywood. ... But by and large, the Globes were an awful awards show that proved nobody involved in the production had bothered, say, to watch the Emmy Awards.

Even moments that should have been deeply affecting were undone by the shambolic production.