The Golden Globe Awards

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.