Lily Gladstone, Ali Wong Score Historic Wins at the 2024 Golden Globes

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Before Issa Rae and Simu Liu announced the winner of the Golden Globe for best limited series, they reflected on the significance of getting to play Barbie and Ken on the big screen.

“We may not have been what first popped up in people’s minds when they thought of Barbie or Ken, but that’s changed, and we’re hoping to continue to push the boundaries of the roles we can play,” said Rae.

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“By that, of course, we mean white people roles,” Liu added.

Plenty of white people roles (nine among the 14 acting races) continued to win awards at the 2024 Golden Globes, but there were a handful of exceptions, including two firsts in the ceremony’s 81-year history.

Lily Gladstone became the first Indigenous person to receive a Golden Globe, portraying the real-life Osage woman married to a murderer in Killers of the Flower Moon. “This is for every little res kid, every little urban kid, every little Native kid out there who has a dream, who is seeing themselves represented and our stories told by ourselves, in our own words,” said the best actress in a motion picture, drama winner, who opened her acceptance speech introducing herself in the Blackfeet language.

Meanwhile, Ali Wong added “best actress in a limited series” to the list of categories that have had at least one winner of Asian descent. Her win was part of a sweep for limited series winner Beef, with lead actor Steven Yeun and creator Lee Sung Jin adding to the tally of Asian winners, which also included legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, who won best animated feature for his final film, The Boy and the Heron. The Studio Ghibli movie is the first non-English language film to win in the category.

The other two nonwhite Globe winners in 2024 are both Black women: Da’Vine Joy Randolph won best supporting actress in a motion picture for The Holdovers, while Ayo Edebiri won best actress in a television musical or comedy for The Bear. “The beauty is that all the time I poured into my crafts and all the sleepless nights I had to think about how I contribute to this industry as a woman of color has been worth it,” Randolph said backstage after her win.

Latino people were once again shut out at an awards ceremony, although best TV comedy winner The Bear is co-showrun by a Latina writer-producer Joanna Calo. She and co-showrunner Christopher Storer were absent for their series’ win, sending instead the show’s multiracial cast to the stage to accept, with remarks by castmember Lionel Boyce, who is Black.

“The room is really white,” remarked first-time Globes host Jo Koy in his opening monologue at the Beverly Hilton on Sunday night. Although the Filipino stand-up comic closed the ceremony with a few words in Tagalog and despite the presence of nominated projects like The Color Purple, Past Lives, American Fiction and Abbott Elementary, that comment remains true when it comes to the concentration of power and hardware in Hollywood.

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