Los Angeles – “La La Land” swept the 74th Golden Globes awards off its feet Sunday in Los Angeles, winning seven trophies including best film in the musical or comedy category for its bittersweet American love story told in song and dance.
Director Damian Chazelle’s musical romance stars Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling as artists who dream of love and success but end up having to choose between them.
Stone and Gosling – who learned jazz piano and tap dance for his role as a pianist – took both lead acting prizes in the comedy or musical category. “La La Land” also won best screenplay, score and song, and best director for Chazelle.
“Moonlight,” director Barry Jenkins’ coming-of-age story about an African-American boy in Florida, won best drama – the most coveted prize at the awards which splits top prizes into drama and musical or comedy categories.
Paul Verhoeven’s rape drama “Elle” took the prize for best foreign-language film, as well as best lead actress for Isabelle Huppert. Casey Affleck (“Manchester by the Sea”) won best lead actor for his performance as a Boston janitor with a troubled past.
Television series “Atlanta,” “The Crown” and “The People vs OJ Simpson – American Crime Story” won the Golden Globe’s top television awards.
But “La La Land’s” clean sweep of all the prizes for which it was nominated made it the star of the show – starting with emcee Jimmy Fallon’s opening musical number, which parodied the film’s fantastical, classic movie-musical-style dance scenes, ending with a pas de deux between Fallon and Justin Timberlake.
Accepting the best picture award, “La La Land” producer Fred Berger acknowledged the long odds against making a successful 1940s-style movie musical in the 21st century.
Berger thanked the film’s backers “for dismissing all conventional wisdom and jumping off a cliff with us to make this movie.”
The evening’s spotlight turned to politics as well, coming fewer than two weeks before the inauguration of Donald Trump as US president.
Fallon’s opening monologue took a jab at the contentious US presidential election, calling the Golden Globes “one of the few places left where America still honours the popular vote,” a reference to Trump’s victory under the US electoral college system despite winning around three million fewer votes than Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Eight-time Golden Globe winner Meryl Streep, who received the Golden Globes’ Cecil B DeMille lifetime achievement award, used her speech to chastise Trump for a performance she said “stunned” her – the incoming US president’s mockery of a disabled reporter during a campaign rally.
She called for Hollywood to celebrate and defend diversity, pointing out that “Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners, and if we kick them all out, you will have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts.”
First awarded in 1944, the Golden Globes honour the best in television and film across more than 25 categories at a gala dinner in the Los Angeles neighbourhood of Beverly Hills.
While the jury consists of about 100 relatively unknown members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the awards punch above their weight, drawing the third-largest global audience among awards shows after the Oscars and the Grammys.
The Globes’ top film winners often coincide with the Academy Awards, and are seen across the industry as a sneak preview of possible Oscar nominees and winners, particularly in acting categories.
-dpa
