Golden Globe Award, any of the annual awards given by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) in recognition of outstanding achievement in motion pictures and television during the preceding year. The Golden Globes are regarded as second only to the Academy Awards (for the film) and the Emmy Awards (for television) in the entertainment industry, and the televised awards ceremony is a similarly lavish affair.
Golden Globes are given in a variety of categories for each medium. The film awards include those for best motion picture, best actor, and best actress, with drama and comedy or musical categories. There are also awards for supporting acting performances, direction, screenwriting, music, animated films, and foreign-language films. There are television awards for drama series, comedy or musical series, miniseries or movies, and acting performances in each genre or format. Members of the HFPA cast ballots to determine a slate of nominees and, in most cases, a single winner in each category for all competitive awards. In most years, the Cecil B. DeMille Award, a prize for lifetime achievement, is also bestowed. Golden Globe winners receive a statuette consisting of a globe encircled by a strip of film.
The awards were founded in 1944 by the newly formed Hollywood Foreign Correspondents Association, a group of entertainment journalists based in Los Angeles but working for publications outside the United States. After the reincorporation of a short-lived splinter group in 1955, it was renamed the HFPA. The following year, the Golden Globe Awards, which had previously only honored motion pictures, presented its first television awards. In the mid-1960s, the awards ceremony was first broadcast nationally on television.
For much of their history, the Golden Globe Awards have been plagued by credibility issues, owing in part to accusations of impropriety that the HFPA has occasionally faced. In 1968, for example, the Federal Communications Commission, while investigating NBC’s Golden Globes broadcast, claimed that the HFPA had “substantially misled the public” about its procedures for selecting winners; one specific allegation was that the organization had negotiated to extend awards to some performers in exchange for their attendance at the ceremony. In 1982, it was revealed that the husband of actress Pia Zadora, who had won an award widely regarded as undeserved, had bribed voters with various favors. Both incidents caused the ceremony to be removed from network television for several years.
However, by the twenty-first century, the growing importance of awards of all kinds in the entertainment industry had bestowed prestige on the long-running Golden Globes. As a precursor to the Oscars, the Golden Globes for Film were closely watched, and the ceremony was frequently among television’s most-watched events. However, the Golden Globes’ future was called into question in 2021. Following ongoing allegations of ethics violations and criticism of the HFPA’s lack of diversity, NBC announced that the ceremony would no longer be televised beginning in 2022. The awards were announced on social media that year.
