Annually, the name of the year’s “Best” movie is plastered on every newspaper, magazine, and social media feed. The winners’ speeches are watched endlessly, and their outfits critiqued by millions watching through the cameras of red-carpet photographers. They, having risen to the top of their industry, celebrate at a brilliant afterparty, hidden away from the public.
This, for many people, is the film award show experience. Turn on the TV, tease the silly celebrities’ weird clothes, see who wins, listen to their speech, and then turn off the TV. But there is one important yet seldom raised question about the Golden Globes and Oscars: what is the difference?
The Golden Globes were founded under the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), a conglomerate largely made up of film journalists. In 2023, the HPFA was dissolved due to controversy and rebranded as the Golden Globes Association. The award show, now produced by Dick Clark Productions, is voted on by an international group of hundreds of journalists and photographers.
The Oscars, unlike the Globes, are voted on by actors, writers, directors, and others working directly within the film industry. This group, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, was founded with the sole purpose of supporting advancements within the world of cinema. According to Gold Derby, there are over 11,000 members in the Academy, nearly 25% of whom reside outside of the United States.
The difference in voters between film journalists and filmmakers is key to understanding voting differences that arise between the award shows. One of these differences arose between the latest Golden Globes and the recently released Oscar nominations. That difference? Sinners.
Sinners (2025)
Receiving seven nominations, Sinners left the Globes with two wins, one for Best Original Score (Ludwig Göransson) and the Cinematic and Box Office Achievement Award. Although Ryan Coogler’s vampire thriller came away with awards, some fans felt the movie was “snubbed.”
On January 22nd, two members of the Academy announced the nominees for the 98th Oscars. This announcement declared Sinners a new record holder for most nominations ever secured by a single film, with sixteen. This broke the previous record of 14 nominations, held by All About Eve (1950), Titanic (1997), and La La Land (2016).
At the Academy Awards, every award is unquestionably difficult to acquire and highly coveted. However, there is a selection of categories that have come to be called “The Big Five,” for their heightened prestige. These are Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay (Original or Adapted). Sinners is nominated for all but one.
Between the Golden Globes and the Oscars, Sinners’ total nominations increased by more than double. For such a unique situation, it is important to note that it has happened twice in the last twenty years.
The Hurt Locker (2009)
The Hurt Locker, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, is an action-packed war film starring Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Christian Camargo, Ralph Fiennes, David Morse, and Guy Pearce. The movie follows a bomb disposal team in the Iraq War, placing a heavy emphasis on the psychological strain of combat.
In total, The Hurt Locker received three Golden Globe nominations. It won nothing. On the contrary, the movie scored nominations for nine Academy Awards and won six. Alongside awards for Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing, the movie was the first female-directed film to win Best Picture.
For the Best Picture award, Locker beat out fierce competition, with many of the nominees remaining classics to this very day. Some of the losing nominees were Up, Inglorious Basterds, and one particularly well-known film by the name of Avatar.
At the 2010 Golden Globes, Avatar won awards for Best Motion Picture – Drama, and Best Director, beating out The Hurt Locker for both.
What Avatar had that The Hurt Locker did not was historic commercial success. To this day, Avatar is the highest grossing film of all time, with a lifetime, worldwide gross of $2.9 billion. This commercial success, paired with massive star power (Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldana, Sam Worthington), is what made it stand out to the film-journalist voting base.
Parasite (2019)
Two families. One rich and one poor.
This is the foundation upon which Bong-Joon Ho built his 2019 film, Parasite. The ensemble cast sports major names in Korean cinema, like Song Kang-ho, Cho Yeo-jeong, Park So-dam, and Lee Sun-kyun.
Parasite, though winning big at the Oscars, only won one Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. In addition to it’s winning category, Bong Joon-Ho received nominations for Best Director and Best Screenplay.
At the Academy awards, the movie took home some of the most sought after awards, winning Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature. This success at the Oscars marked an important moment for cinema. The film was the first non-English language movie to win the award for Best Picture.
The pattern that Parasite‘s lopsided award reception reveals is that record-breaking films do better at the Oscars than the Globes.
The Pattern
The Hurt Locker was the first film directed by a woman to win Best Picture but didn’t do nearly as well at the Globes. Parasite was the first non-English language film to win Best Picture, but it didn’t do as well at the Globes. The first script written by a Black writer to win Best Original Screenplay, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, didn’t win any awards at the Globes.
If Michael B. Jordan wins Best Actor in a Leading Role at the Academy Awards, he will be the first actor to win the award for playing two characters. If Ryan Coogler wins Best Director, he will be the first Black director to do so. If the film wins Best Cinematography, Autumn Durald Arkapaw will be the first woman to ever win the award.
The list goes on.
Differing voting bases across award shows, evidently, result in different outcomes. But this doesn’t mean the outcomes are predictable. Yet, patterns still arise. And the pattern in Golden Globes under-performers, with “first-ever” potential, often leave the Oscars with serious hardware.
