Nominations for the 83rd Annual Golden Globe Awards arrived before dawn on Monday, and in a busy awards season filled with early feints and false starts, one film walked away clearly winning the morning's showdown: “One battle after another.”
Paul Thomas AndersonThe ambitious film about former political radicals reckoning with middle age, compromise and the ideals they once wore more proudly appeared almost everywhere the Globes could accommodate it, topping the list with nine nominations. It won awards for best picture (musical or comedy), director, screenplay and several actors, marking the broadest show of support for any film and giving the still-undecided Oscar race something of a focus.
“One Battle After Another” is already a solid critical success, collecting top prizes from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Gotham Awards and the National Board of Review – an unusually consistent run that began to set it apart from the crowd even before industry groups weighed in.
Elsewhere, the drama category highlighted how international and fluid the race remains. The lineup is heavily comprised of directors with strong global followings, including Jafar Panahi's tightly wound political drama It Was Just an Accident, Kleber Mendonça Filho's Brazilian spy thriller The Secret Agent and Joachim Trier's emotionally sensitive family drama Sentimental Value. Joining them are Guillermo del Toro's long-running gothic passion project Frankenstein, Chloe Zhao's literary adaptation Hamnet and Ryan Coogler's muscular, genre-bending period film The Sinners.
Comedy or Musical Race drew more overtly on the Globe's eclectic instincts. Alongside Anderson's film were Josh Safdie's frantic ping-pong drama Marty Supreme, Yorgos Lanthimos' latest twist Bugonia, Park Chan-wook's South Korean satire No Other Choice and two films from director Richard Linklater – the cinephile homage New Wave and the quiet, old-fashioned character study Blue Moon starring Ethan Hawke.
The acting nominations combined gravitas and star power in familiar Globes fashion. Leonardo DiCaprio won the award for One Battle After Another in the musical/comedy category, while the dramatic cast included Michael B. Jordan (The Sinners), Oscar Isaac (Frankenstein) and Dwayne Johnson (Wrecking Machine).
Among the actresses, the main roles were played by Jessie Buckley (“Hamnet”), Renata Reinsve (“Sentimental Value”) and Julia Roberts (“After the Hunt”).
Anderson's film also showed strength in the supporting categories, earning nominations for Benicio del Toro, Sean Penn, Chase Infinity and Teyana Taylor. Meanwhile, “Sentimental Value” emerged as a quiet force, picking up three acting nods among its eight nominations.
The director category featured one of the strongest Oscar morning readings, teaming Anderson with Coogler, Del Toro, Zhao, Trier and Panahi – a lineup that neatly reflects the season's broader critical conversation.
The Golden Globes are still grappling with the fallout from their recent past. A Los Angeles Times Investigation, 2021 reported that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. had no black cast and raised serious ethical and financial concerns, causing industry backlash and prompting NBC to pull the plug in 2022.
In 2023, California regulators approved a restructuring that dissolved the HFPA entirely, transferred its charitable assets to the new Golden Globe Foundation, and transformed the award into a for-profit entity owned by Eldridge Industries and Dick Clark Productions. CBS revived the ceremony last year and later signed a five-year broadcast deal.
This attempt to turn the page did not eliminate the scrutiny. The Globes came under fire this year for introducing a new podcast category after announcing that nominees would be selected using data from Luminate, a firm jointly owned by Penske Media and Eldridge, the same companies that own the awards. Early nominees include “SmartLess,” “Call Her Daddy,” “Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard,” “The Good Party with Amy Poehler,” “The Mel Robbins Podcast” and NPR's “Up First.”
Some in the podcast industry questioned the organization and the increasing commercialization of the award, while Penske officials said most eligible shows chose to participate.
This year's nominations also come at a time of new upheaval in the industry. They arrived a few days later Netflix announced plans to acquire Warner Bros.., a deal that would further consolidate power among streaming platforms and reshape the balance between legacy studios and tech companies—a reminder that even as structures change, awards remain one of the few remaining yardsticks.
On the television side, nominations were widespread. Drama nominees included HBO Max's “Pitt” and “The White Lotus,” Apple TV+'s “Severance” and “Pluribus,” Netflix's “The Diplomat” and Apple's “Slow Horses,” while comedy and music series included “Abbott Elementary,” “Bear,” “Khaki,” “Only Murders in the Building” and “The Studio.”
Academy members don't vote on the Globes, and its reliability as an Oscar frontrunner has always been uneven. Still, in a season that has resisted simple hierarchy, the nominations offer a useful framework for suggesting which battles might matter most next.
The Golden Globe Awards will air on January 11 on CBS and will be hosted by Nikki Glaser.
