The Golden Globes' Future Could Involve More Controversy

As the year draws to a close, film and television enthusiasts are getting a sense of what the year’s most lauded creative works will be. This week saw the announcement of the nominees for the upcoming installment of the Golden Globes, with the associated media attention suggesting that the awards in question have gotten past the controversies that led to boycotts in recent years.

While next month’s awards are likely to have no shortage of A-listers present, that doesn’t necessarily mean there might not be more controversy on the horizon, however. As Puck’s Matthew Belloni reports, there’s a legal challenge in the works to the current configuration of the awards, which took effect last year and saw ownership and management of the awards change hands.

Belloni writes that an anonymous group of former members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association have asked the state of California in a letter to revisit the process that saw the awards shift into private ownership. Among the issues cited by this group, Belloni reports, are whether the change in ownership violated state guidelines about nonprofit organizations being converted into for-profit businesses.

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When asked for comment, the California Attorney General’s office confirmed that they were reviewing the letter, but otherwise declined to comment on the matter.

Could we see another shift in the fortunes of the Golden Globes before the 2026 iteration of the awards show takes place? At this point, anything seems possible — but at the very least, the 2025 awards show has a signfiicant amount of hype in the weeks before it happens.