Dear Gossips,

Look, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is weird and what they decide doesn’t necessarily mean that’s how Oscar is going to swing. But what last night’s Golden Globes did tell us, or confirm for us, is that this is the most wide-open awards season in a long, long time. Bohemian Rhapsody taking Best Motion Picture Drama and A Star is Born getting just one award was a major shakeup. It signals to all the other campaigns that ASIB’s frontrunner status was indeed vulnerable which, for award season junkies like me, is good news. Suspense is good news. Don’t we all want to head into the Oscars with popular movies going up against arty movies and no one knows what will happen until it happens? 

We’ll get to all of this and of course we’ll get to the fashion. We’ll shout at each other about the style choices and the dresses and all of it. This was the first major award show red carpet of the year. And it’s been a year since the Golden Globes red carpet blackout of 2018. Is that why it felt like an overcorrection in the other direction? Is that why we went FULL PROM at the Golden Globes? 

It was really prommy, non? So much taffeta (which for me is always TOO MUCH taffeta) and bows and ribbons and trains and billowing and drama – like a pendulum in comparison to last year. Which is how Martin and Ruth Bader Ginsburg describe American politics. Someone somewhere should turn that into an essay: the pendulum politics of the red carpet. 

That said, what I appreciated is that there was very little or virtually no huffiness about fashion questions. And maybe it’s because this was one of the most inclusive red carpets we’ve seen in a while – and that doesn’t mean the work is complete, just that you could argue that incremental, albeit slow, change was evident – and so many faces on that carpet traditionally aren’t the ones were invited to participate in the past. They don’t get to show up year after year, in designer gown after designer gown, feigning boredom or annoyance at having to talk about what they’re wearing. Billy Porter certainly didn’t mind anyone noticing what he was wearing. We should f-cking celebrate what Billy Porter was wearing. Billy Porter was like… I am doing the MOST with this moment. And so he should. 

I feel like that was one of the subtexts of Carol Burnett’s speech too. In her day, they did the most with what they had and what they did and had is not valued in the same way now. Some of that, of course, is because analog is no longer viable. But you know when she talked about the size of the cast and crew of The Carol Burnett Show and what it took to put it on every week, including two guests every week who’d commit to that kind of preparation? It just doesn’t happen anymore, they’re over it, and it was a gentle reminder that, well, some people don’t have the luxury of being “over” something. Also the beading on her jacket was some of the best beading we saw all night. 

So. We’re ready! Duana, Kathleen, and I are up all night, posting as quickly as we can. THANK YOU for joining us. We love award season blogging and we love award season arguing. Please note – it’ll be a heavy day on the site, covering several pages, so if you’re checking in later, scroll through it all to get caught up and definitely keep getting mad at us on Twitter or email! We love the fight!

Yours in gossip,

Lainey