2023 Awards Season: A Rundown

Hey, everyone, as the new year has drawn in, we have also entered into awards season! Some have already taken place like the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards, but others, like the Oscars, have not. There’s not enough time to cover absolutely everything in this article, but I will hit some of the high points. So you’ll get some of the pop culture moments that have already come out of the season, as well as the most important wins, losses, nominations, and snubs.

To start, I’ll give a brief timeline to map everything out. Both the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice Awards happened in the month of January, as well as the nomination announcements for the SAG Awards (SAG stands for Screen Actors Guild) and the Academy Awards (Oscars). February will start with the Grammy’s on the 5th and end with the SAG Awards on the 26th with some other awards ceremonies happening in between like the BAFTAs on the 19th. The actual ceremony for the Oscars will finally take place on the 12th of March, but before that ceremony, if you are a fan of indie movies, the Film Independent Spirit Awards will be held on the 4th of March.

The biggest wins of the Golden Globes were those for people who were finally getting the recognition they deserved after years of being overlooked. One such award win was Michelle Yeoh winning Best Actress in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for Everything Everywhere All at Once. She spoke about the ageism and racism she has experienced in the industry and remarked on how as the years get bigger, “it seems like opportunities start to get smaller as well.” Colin Farrell and Ke Huy Quan—who both won the categories they were nominated in for The Banshees of Inisherin and Everything Everywhere All at Once respectively—each echoed this sentiment and expressed gratitude for the second chances they received in Hollywood. Some funny moments that happened at the Globes included Jennifer Coolidge expressing her anxieties about tripping over her words and mispronouncing someone’s name just to go on and call a Golden Globe an Oscar! The Globes have not had an amazing reputation in the past, and they are trying to dig themselves out of the hole that resulted from said reputation, so this year’s ceremony definitely fell victim to this attempted “renaissance.” However, it does not seem like the show is going anywhere yet, so stay tuned for next year’s tomfoolery on that front. For a full list of the winners, click here.

The Critics Choice Awards are not as big a night as the Globes, but they are still worth talking about. Some notable wins from the night are Everything Everywhere All at Once winning five awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Editing; The Dropout winning both Best Limited Series and Best Actress in a Limited Series; Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery winning both Best Ensemble and Best Comedy; Abbott Elementary winning both Best Comedy Series and Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series; and finally Black Panther: Wakanda Forever had both Best Supporting Actress and Best Costume Design. When Better Call Saul won for Best Drama Series, the showrunner, Peter Gould, joked “I can’t believe we won. We never win.” For context, over its six-season run, the show has been nominated for 48 Emmys and not won a single one. For a full list of winners, click here.

Both the lists for SAG nominations and Oscar nominations have been released. This year saw a tie for the record of the most nominations for a film at the SAG awards. Both The Banshees of Inisherin and Everything Everywhere All at Once received five nods each; something only done three other times with Shakespeare In Love (1998), Chicago (2002), and Doubt (2008). Both movies earned nominations for the best ensemble category which is regarded as the SAG Awards’ highest honor of the night. The SAG Awards are known to be a precursor to the Oscars, and the past two years have seen the SAG lineup translate to the Oscars lineup, but this year there was some variation because certain “snubs” from the SAGs were rectified with Oscar nominations, but that led to other snubs from the Oscars. One example being that Michelle Williams did not receive a Best Actress nomination from the SAG Awards, but she was nominated in the category for the Academy Awards. Some actors snubbed by the Oscars were Danielle Deadwyler and Viola Davis not getting nominations for their performances in Till and The Woman King respectively. Some movies that were expected to be included in the nominations but weren’t were Nope, The Woman King, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

Aside from the snubs, there were some good surprises that came from the Oscar nominations announcements, though, like hearing Riz Ahmed say the word “dicks” live for the nomination received by the short film “My Year of Dicks.” On a serious note, though, some nominations that weren’t expected, but were well deserved, went out to Andrea Riseborough for her work in To Leslie and Hong Chau’s performance in The Whale. Chau’s performance was given a nod with a nomination in the Best Supporting Actress category. Fun fact, Hong Chau is from Louisiana, more specifically New Orleans, and she graduated from my alma mater, Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts (LSMSA) in the late 90s.

For the full list of SAG Awards nominees, click here, and for the full list of Oscar nominations, click here. This article focused mainly on the TV and film awards, so I did not want to just drop in the Grammy’s conversation randomly. Since the Grammy’s will take place right after this issue drops, I will cover the Grammy’s next issue and talk about the nominations as well as the winners altogether.