★ Golden Globe Awards

01Why it matters

Its value to the calendar is positional. Coming ten weeks before the Oscars and before Academy nominations voting opens, the Globes are the first large public verdict on a film year, and a win here demonstrably raises a title's visibility during the weeks that matter most to its campaign. The double remit also gives television its only place alongside film at an event of this scale, which is why streamer and network executives attend in numbers that no other film award draws.

The institution is also the most recently rebuilt of the major awards, and that is worth knowing. After the criticism of 2021, the studio and network boycott that followed, and the dissolution of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in 2023, the Globes now sit inside a commercial company rather than a members' association. In our reading the ceremony has recovered its audience faster than its authority: the room is full again and the broadcast reaches roughly eighteen million people, but the prize carries less predictive weight than it did, and is best read as a publicity event with a real effect rather than as a judgment.

02The week around it

Beverly Hills absorbs one evening rather than a season. The hotel's grounds are given over to the arrivals structure and the broadcast compound for several days beforehand, and Wilshire Boulevard at Santa Monica — one of the busiest intersections in the city — carries closures and diverted traffic on the Sunday afternoon and evening. Guests staying at the hotel are affected; everyone else in Beverly Hills is mildly inconvenienced.

Beyond the hotel there is no public programme. Reporting each year describes a cluster of studio, network and publication receptions across Beverly Hills and West Hollywood that night, none of them open to visitors. Early January is otherwise one of the better weeks to be in Los Angeles: the holiday traffic has gone, the air is usually clear after winter rain, and the film year's contenders are all still playing in the city's cinemas.

03When to arrive

There is no reason to time a trip to the ceremony unless you are in it. If you are in Los Angeles that weekend, arrive Friday and avoid the Wilshire corridor on Sunday afternoon. Anyone coming for the film year rather than the night itself should plan for the preceding week, when the nominated films are in cinemas and the city is quiet.

04Where to stay

Beverly Hills is the obvious base and the most affected: the Beverly Wilshire at the foot of Rodeo Drive and the Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunset are the landmarks people navigate by, and The Beverly Hilton itself is largely committed on ceremony weekend. West Hollywood and the Sunset Strip are five to fifteen minutes east with the densest concentration of hotel bars and restaurants. Century City, immediately west, is quieter, newer and unaffected by the closures. Santa Monica is twenty minutes away in good traffic and a different kind of stay altogether.

05Access and hospitality

The ceremony is invitation-only. Seats at the ballroom tables are allocated through the organizer to nominees and their guests, to studios, networks and streamers, and to the voting body and press; there is no public ticket, no ballot and no accreditation route for general visitors. The organizer publishes no hospitality packages, and anything sold as a Globes seat or after-party invitation should be treated as fraudulent. The Beverly Hilton is a working hotel the rest of the year and its bars, restaurant and pool are open to the public outside event closures.

06Where the social activity happens

Almost all of it is inside one building for one evening, which makes the public geography thin. The arrivals are visible only from behind barriers on the Wilshire Boulevard frontage. What is open is the surrounding district: the Golden Triangle between Wilshire and Santa Monica, with Rodeo Drive and the restaurants on Canon and Beverly Drive; the hotel bars along Sunset in West Hollywood, which are where the industry is actually visible across the whole of awards season; and the Century City and Melrose restaurant clusters either side. For film rather than people, the Academy Museum on Wilshire at Fairfax is fifteen minutes east.

07Getting there

08Practicalities

09History

The first Globes were awarded in 1944 by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, an organization of foreign correspondents based in Los Angeles founded the year before, and the HFPA presented them for eighty years. The ceremony settled into The Beverly Hilton's International Ballroom in 1961 — six years after Welton Becket's hotel opened at Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards, and three years after the ballroom reopened as the largest on the West Coast at 1,700 seats — and has been there ever since.

The rupture came in 2021, when the HFPA was criticized for having no Black members. Netflix, Amazon, NBC and WarnerMedia withdrew support, one actor returned his awards, and the association promised a fifty per cent membership expansion. A restructuring under Todd Boehly's Eldridge Industries followed, and on June 12, 2023 Dick Clark Productions — owned by Penske Media and Eldridge — acquired the Globes outright; the HFPA's charitable work passed to a separate Golden Globe Foundation. The voting body was rebuilt as an international panel of working journalists, and new categories have been added since, including cinematic and box-office achievement and, at the 83rd ceremony, podcasts.

10Who is there

Film and television nominees with their agents and publicists; studio, network and streaming executives in larger numbers than at any other film award, because television is on the same card; the international voting body of journalists; presenters and performers booked for the broadcast; the jewelry and fashion houses dressing the arrivals; and an accredited press and photography corps on the Wilshire frontage and in the backstage rooms.