The Golden Globes awards have been sold by the group that administers it, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association – ending years of controversy over jury bias, the racial makeup of the awarding body, show ticket sales and declining ratings.
The HFPA, which has 310 members, is now closing.
The awards continue, but are operated by a private company, Dick Clark Productions, and Eldridge, a Connecticut-based holding company.
The Globes will be voted on by the original members of the HFPA, along with the more than 200 non-affiliated international entertainment journalists who have joined the group in recent years. In February 2021, it emerged, in a bomb that exposes the Los Angeles Timesthat there were no black members of the HFPA.
This year’s Golden Globes, on January 10, saw record low ratings of just 5.36 million.
That number is down 23 percent from 2021, the last time the Golden Globes aired, when ratings were just 6.9 million — a steep drop from 18 million in 2020.
Helen Hoehne, president of the HFPA, said their members approved the sale of the awards.
“We are pleased to complete this highly anticipated member-approved transaction and transition from a member-led organization to a commercial enterprise,” she said.
Helen Hoehne, the president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, will attend the ceremony on Jan. 10. On Monday, she confirmed that the prizes had been sold and that her organization would close
The 80th Golden Globes was held on January 10 and aired on both NBC and Peacock. There was a full celebrity boycott of the 2022 Globes and the ceremony went ahead without television. It was announced on Monday that the awards had been sold and would now be administered by a private consortium rather than the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
Ratings plummeted this year for the star-studded Golden Globes event, with some viewers labeling the show a ‘snoozefest’ of ‘politicized’ monologues
Eldridge CEO Todd Boehly called the HFPA’s dissolution a “significant milestone in the evolution of the Golden Globes.”
He thanked Hoehne for helping to implement reforms, including “a robust approach to governance” that had helped professionalize a prize organization long known for infighting and scandal.
Hoehne was elected president in 2021 and led the admission of a large and diverse class of members.
As of August 2021, the HFPA has undergone a complete review of its bylaws and adopted a code of conduct in addition to mandatory diversity, harassment and sensitivity training for all members.
The sale comes after years of unrest, which was mocked by this year’s host, comedian Jerrod Carmichael.
His Golden Globes opening monologue made Hollywood Foreign Press Association members “uncomfortable” and sucked the “fun” out of the Golden Globes by focusing the show’s complicated history on minorities, and the recent controversy that caused the show to was not aired last year.
He joked about his own role as the show’s host midway through as a comedian selected for his race to become “the black face of an embattled white organization.”
“It was all so awkward and uncomfortable,” a source told me The Hollywood Reporter.
“The show is supposed to be fun, and it didn’t feel fun,” said another due to the tone and subject matter of Carmichael’s monologue.
Comedian Jerrod Carmichael delivered a sometimes awkward monologue about the recent Golden Globes diversity scandal and how he was chosen to perform because of his race
“This show, the Golden Globe Awards, didn’t air last year because the Hollywood Foreign Press Association… didn’t have a single black member until George Floyd died [in 2020]. So do what you will with that information,” Carmichael said during his monologue
He added that he had been asked several times to meet with HFPA President Helen Hoehne after he accepted the gig, which he also joked that he would be paid as much as $500,000 to do.
Carmichael said he thought meeting Hoehne would be a “trap.”
Carmichael kicked off the 80th Annual Golden Globes by telling the audience that he was only invited to present “because I’m black.”
“This show, the Golden Globe Awards, didn’t air last year because the Hollywood Foreign Press Association — which I won’t say was a racist organization, but they didn’t have a single black member until George Floyd died. [in 2020].
“So do what you want with that information,” he said.
The fall of the Globes came slowly and then all of a sudden when last year, mired in allegations of sexual misconduct under her leadership and allegations of an endemic gift-for-gong culture, the show was ripped off the air.
In 2018, actor Brendan Fraser came forward to claim that former HFPA president Philip Berk, 88, assaulted him at a HFPA luncheon in 2003 by grabbing his buttocks. Berk called the story “a total fabrication.”
Jennifer Coolidge accepts the award for Best Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Television Film for “The White Lotus” onstage at the 80th Annual Golden Globe Awards
Michelle Yeoh, 60, won this year’s Best Actress award for her role in Everything Everywhere All At Once
In 2019, the nonprofit was criticized for failing to nominate female directors for awards, despite the critical and box office success of Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers and Greta Gerwig’s Little Women.
In 2020, a Norwegian journalist sued the HFPA over a “culture of corruption” in which members accepted “thousands of dollars in emoluments” from the same studios they assigned gongs to. A federal judge dismissed the case, ruling that plaintiff Kjersti Flaa suffered no damages.
Last year, the LA Times revealed that none of the HFPA’s 87 members were black, prompting the recruitment of 21 new members.
Six of the new recruits are black, ten women, six Latinx, five Asian and four Middle Eastern or North African, according to the Globes.
Berk also returned to the spotlight in April when he was kicked out of the organization for allegedly calling Black Lives Matter a “racist hate movement” in an email.