Thoughts On The Golden Globes(and trying to think of more clever titles for posts)

I usually don't pay too much attention to the Golden Globes, but I thought it would be fun to see if researching the history of the awards can help predict the Academy Award nominations. I'll only concentrate on the Comedy/Musical side since everyone already knows Avatar will get an Academy nomination.


The immediate reaction is that The Hangover might be a surprise pick for a Best Picture nomination after winning Best Picture for a Comedy/Musical the G.G. Over the past 20 years, the Best ComedyMusical winner was nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture 9 times (45%). What throws this statistic off is the fact that ten movies will be nominated for an Academy Award instead of five. This means that there is a better than 50% chance that The Hangover will be getting a Best Picture nomination.

What about the four movies that lost to The Hangover? Does that mean they have a worse chance at an Oscar nomination than The Hangover? The answer is not necessarily. There have been 11 times over the past 20 years where the G.G. winner for a Comedy/Musical did not get an Oscar nomination. Of those 11 years, there have been 6 times when one of 4 losing comedies/musicals got a nomination. What that means is if The Hangover is not announced as a Best Picture nomination, there is over a 50% chance that either 500 Days of Summer, Julie & Julia, It’s Complicated, or Nine will get one.

In the days of 5 Best Picture nominations, there wasn’t usually room for multiple comedy nominees. Out of the 9 years that the G.G. winner for Comedy/Musical got an Academy nomination, only two of those years did a G.G. loser also get an Oscar nomination. In 1997, it happened when As Good As It Gets won and The Full Monty also scored an Oscar nomination. It also happened in 2004 when Sideways won, and Ray was also recognized by the Academy. With this year’s Best Picture expansion, there might be more room for comedies/musicals to make the list. This was a mistake I made when I made my original predictions. Out of the 10 movies I chose, only Up and A Serious Man can be classified as a comedy. Neither of these movies were nominated for the Golden Globe. When was the last time a comedy/musical was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar but didn’t even get a nomination by the G.G.? The only time in the past 20 years I see that it happened is 1998’s Life Is Beautiful. This should mean that The Hangover has a much better chance at getting an Oscar nomination than A Serious Man. If I revise my predictions, I would replace The White Ribbon with The Hangover. I would probably also kick out Invictus and make room for 500 Days Of Summer, which I feel has the best chance out of the 4 G.G. losers in the Comedy/Musical category. I have a feeling Christina is going to stay with her prediction for Nine. I think we should have a final revised prediction list right before the Academy announces their nominations.