Golden Globes 2019: who will win – and who should win – the film categories
The Favourite, A Star Is Born, The Wife and Bohemian Rhapsody are likely winners for various awards on Sunday; but Widows, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Shoplifters and Roma deserve recognition too
The best dramas list for the Globes – to be presented on 6 January – contains something notable yet hardly noted. It puts African American-themed films in the majority: three out of five. Ryan Coogler’s colossally successful Afrofuturist Marvel superhero movie Black Panther, Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman and Barry Jenkins’s James Baldwin adaptation If Beale Street Could Talk. All three are really substantial movies, though I think Lee’s is tonally uncertain in a way that Jenkins’s and Coogler’s aren’t. It could well be that Beale Street will win, and no one would quarrel with rewarding the artistry and moral seriousness of a film-maker such as Jenkins. Bohemian Rhapsody – the story of Freddie Mercury and Queen – is a surprise entry: thoroughly enjoyable but very much all about Rami Malek’s bravura performance. But I have to say that Bradley Cooper’s richly powerful and unashamedly emotional melodrama A Star Is Born gets my support — and I suspect that of Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) voters as well.