This Year’s Golden Globes Race for Best Musical or Comedy Contains No Actual Musicals Nor Comedies. Discuss.

It was bound to happen eventually, though 2025 seems like an odd time for this particular inevitability: the Golden Globes have assembled a group of six nominees in the category of Best Motion Picture: Musical or Comedy that includes no musicals nor comedies. As Coffee Talk host Linda Richman would say, “Discuss.”

Now, a few caveats here are necessary. The first and most important is that the Golden Globes do not matter very much. They have persisted because we in the media are complicit in treating them as Oscar forerunners. What they have actually done, in their previous incarnation as the voting body of the Hollywood Foreign Press and as the same basic thing under a new name, is attempt to predict the Oscars and, as such, look like tea leaves that must be examined in the run-up to the biggest movie awards around. They occupy a weird, nebulous zone between critics’ groups (like those based in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other areas) and industry bodies (like the BAFTAs and the Oscars). As such, the Globes’ splitting of their Best Picture awards into Drama and Musical/Comedy really just gives them extra bites at the apple in terms of predictions. With twelve nominees, it’s become a lot easier to look like bellwethers of Oscar fortune.

Yet it’s also kind of irresistible, because the Oscars so often favor drama over comedy. In the days when the Academy’s Best Picture lineup had only five nominees, this meant extra attention to a lot of terrific movies that the Oscars overlooked in that top category, including Toy Story 2, Being John Malkovich, Almost Famous, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. (More than once, the actual best American movie of the year would miss Best Picture but make it into the Globes.) That continued even after the Best Picture expansion; Bridesmaids and Moonrise Kingdom are two Globes-nominated movies that are arguably better-remembered than those that edged them out at the Oscars. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm won the top prize for 2020! What a delight!

But as musicals have become more prominent in the 21st century than they were for the back half of the 20th, with movies like La La Land becoming serious awards players, there’s also been a quasi-respectability creep in good old Best Musical or Comedy. Because spreading out predictions isn’t any help if you don’t address consensus awards favorites, the Globes increasing use this second category as a way to spread out the competition. Globes-designated comedies of recent years include The Substance, a horror movie with satirical overtones; May/December, a psychological drama with some darkly funny moments; and The Martian, a sci-fi drama that’s more cheerfully entertaining than hilarious.

These fudges seem more prominent in the years where there either hasn’t been a major musical in either category, or a biopic that could easily count as a musical (Elvis, for example, or A Complete Unknown) gets shunted over the bigger leagues of Best Motion Picture: Drama. That leaves movies like Babylon and Poor Things to pass as comedies simply by virtue of depending some manner of spectacle and/or levity. This year, Wicked: For Good unexpectedly failed to make the cut, leaving an all-comedy-or-possibly-no-comedy lineup of One Battle After Another, Marty Supreme, No Other Choice, Bugonia, and two movies from Richard Linklater: Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague.

Here comes another caveat: the studios seem to have a say in which category their movies are entered. It’s not as if Globes voters are just designating these categories on a whim, or attending screenings of Blue Moon where they behold the delicate mix of wit and melancholy, and laugh uproariously like De Niro in Cape Fear. And look, all of these movies are at least somewhat funny. One Battle After Another in particular has some of the funniest scenes of the year. But I’d call it a thriller, a drama, and even a Western before I’d call it an outright comedy. Marty Supreme occupies a similar space (and nothing in that movie is as funny as two or three Leonardo DiCaprio scenes in Battle). The Linklater movies are more light dramas with funny moments than comedies. Bugonia could conceivably be categorized as a dark comedy, and the similarly dark No Other Choice has genuine elements of both farce and satire. But I don’t think anyone would have blinked an eye if they had been slotted into the drama category.

Really, any one of these six could probably pass muster as the “OK, sure” entry to round out the category. But in a year of genuine comedies as varied and well-made as The Phoenician Scheme, Splitsville, Twinless, and The Naked Gun, plus a fascinatingly unconventional musical like The Testament of Ann Lee (which landed star Amanda Seyfried a Best Actress nom), this category without any of those movies really feels like Drama Overflow, and when given the choice, the Globes voters self-evidently cannot resist nominating a more serious-minded, awards-y movie over an actual comedy. The organization does prove its own comedy bona fides, however, when you think about how voters ultimately were more excited about Nouvelle Vague than Wicked 2. That might actually provide a bigger laugh than anything in Novelle Vague (while also being accurate; it is a much better movie than Wicked 2).   

Which brings us back to the Golden Globes not mattering very much. But that as a given, wouldn’t it be nice if they could offer something a little more unusual than picking their 12 favorites from the same group of Oscar hopefuls everyone seems to work from? All six of this year’s Best Musical/Comedy nominees are perfectly respectable movies. At least two of them are likely to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. Where’s the fun in that?

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.