Golden Globes 2019: How the awards defied conventional wisdom to celebrate the underdog

As ‘The Americans’ and ‘The Kominsky Method’ win big, Ed Power looks at this year’s refreshing and occasionally baffling ceremony

Richard Madden was named Best Actor in a TV Drama for 'Bodyguard' at the 76th Annual Golden Globe Awards (Getty)

The conventional wisdom and group-think that tend to materialise around awards season have never held much sway over the Golden Globes and so it once again proved.

The 2019 Globes were, among other things, a celebration of the underdog, where the unofficial mission seemed to be to extol outsiders, also-rans and acquired tastes whose accomplishments have elsewhere gone unacknowledged.

This made the ceremony both refreshing – how encouraging to see Reagan-era slow-burner The Americans finally get its due after six seasons beneath the radar – but also occasionally baffling. The honours festooned upon Netflix’s searingly slight old geezer comedy The Kominsky Method felt, for instance, completely disproportionate to the show’s low-wattage whimsical charms. Eyebrows were surely also raised by the singling out of Richard Madden’s plasterboard performance in Bodyguard (for which he was handed the gong for Best Actor in a TV Drama).

Still, on balance the Globes idiosyncrasy was to be commended. Awarding Best Animated Feature to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse over the more obvious Ralph Breaks the Internet and Wes Anderson’s avalanche of quirkiness, Isle of Dogs, was an inspired departure for instance. Sony’s psychedelic reboot of Spider-Man not only represented a leap into the future for animation – it also lit the way forward for a superhero genre struggling to escape the dead end represented by quippy Marvel juggernauts such as Avengers: Infinity War.

In the television categories, meanwhile, it was the lauding of The Americans that seemed especially significant. Though critically adored and intensely beloved by its fans, the Cold War caper about two Soviet spies (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell) passing themselves off as a husband and wife living the American dream in suburban Washington DC has in general been grievously unheralded.

A best drama accolade could be considered a belated and bittersweet acknowledgement given The Americans has just finished its six year run on FX. But the Globes should nonetheless be commended for a hat-tip to a series overshadowed by noisier and more attention seeking rivals (the Globes did something similar in singling out Ben Whishaw’s portrayal of Norman Scott in A Very English Scandal with the award for Best Actor in a Supporting Dramatic Role).

In the best TV comedy category, giving the nod to Chuck “Two and a Half Men” Lorre’s aforementioned The Kominksy Method was a surprise, as was awarding best actor in a TV comedy series to Michael Douglas, who plays the eponymous grizzled acting coach Sandy Kominksy.

The real scandal here was that Donald Glover’s boundary-pushing Atlanta had not even been shortlisted for its second season. On the other hand, the victorious Kominsky did at least squeeze out Amazon’s wildly overpraised the Marvellous Mrs Maisel, a Fifties-set yuck-fest of such preening smugness it was difficult to sit through, so blindingly bright was its self-satisfaction.

The best thing about the latter was lead actress Rachel Brosnahan, named Best Female Lead in a Comedy. This was difficult to quibble with, even if it was at the expense of the luminescent Alison Brie in Glow.

Ironically, the best comic performance for the year was arguably by Sandra Oh in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s delightful, deadpan – and deeply satirical – thriller Killing Eve. But her win for best actress came in the drama category, at the expense of Julia Roberts in Homecoming and Elisabeth Moss in the sadistic returning run of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Oh was a revelation as an everyday person who just happened to be an international spy and it was encouraging that her performance was honoured over Jodie Comer’s flashier turn as her glamorous nemesis Villanelle (Comer wasn’t even nominated). Here and elsewhere the Golden Globes reminded us that, for all its glam and glitz, it continues to go where others awards ceremonies daren’t venture by championing the dark horse.