"I am who I am and not who others want me to be." This phrase was uttered by Karla Sofía Gascón with the Golden Globe for best comedy or musical in hand. It was the last award of the night and, consequently, the last memorable phrase. The protagonist of Emilia Pérez, the most awarded film, continued her crusade against all that is already triumphing shamelessly in the wide world; a crusade that the actress began at the past Cannes Film Festival when she became the actress of this one and almost every moment. You know, she is from now on and forever the first trans person to win an award in that category. But in her own way, and even without intending to, she gave a beautiful title to a gala, in terms of cinema, that somehow sets the path. In a strange year, without that great film capable of garnering consensuses for the simple reason that there are none anymore, the awards season, which is already pointing to its peak at the Oscars, has made a happy decision: to highlight issues such as risk, fever, the extreme, the doubtful, the daring to make mistakes, the brilliant... In other words, cinema determined to be what it wants to be. Nothing more.
Thus, the most awarded film of the night was a narcomusical that embraces chaos, the crossing of genres (cinematic and others), provocation, and an absolute lack of shame with a memorable sense of freedom. Emilia Pérez, directed by French director Jacques Audiard, winner of the Golden Globes for best comedy or musical, non-English language film, supporting actress (Zoe Saldaña), and song (El mal, by singer-songwriter Camille and composer Clement Ducol, along with Audiard), is exactly what it wants to be without limitations or restrictions of any kind; it is exactly like its protagonist Karla Sofía Gascón. The fact that the actress from Alcobendas gave up the best actress award for which she was nominated to Demi Moore for her work in The Substance by Coralie Fargeat is a reason for lament, but without exaggeration. After all, Moore's work in her latest film is also radically different from everything, including Moore herself. Here and now, she is who she is and not what others (especially Hollywood) insisted for so long that she be.
Alongside it, The Brutalist, by Brady Corbet, the other triumph of the evening with awards for best drama, direction, and male performance (by the revived Adrien Brody) is also exactly the film it wants to be against all algorithms, preconceived ideas, traditions, and box office projections. The story of the Jewish architect who flees from the greatest atrocity humanity has been capable of to be engulfed by the most lysergic nightmare man has devised (whether capitalism, the American dream...) is an excessive film over three hours long shot in VistaVision format that embraces the screen and the viewer's gaze with an eagerness and devotion that admits no excuses. It is cinema that devours cinema and places itself on the edge of all abysses, that doubts and denies, that subjugates and burns. It is cinema that, once again, wants to be exactly what it is. Whatever that may be.
One could say that the rest of the awards followed the same script. The Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres prevailing over names like Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, or Tilda Swinton, who was nominated for Almodóvar's film The Room Next Door, was an act of generosity and even lucidity. The film Still Here by Walter Salles is above all a clear exercise in honesty, transparency, and commitment against the dictatorship that Bolsonaro denies, offering its protagonist not so much an opportunity to shine, which she does, as to confess. And the Golden Globe voters saw that. The same goes for the superb and electric work of Kieran Culkin in A Real Pain by Jesse Eisenberg, following his visceral performance not so long ago in the series Succession. The same applies to the partly invisible work of Sebastian Stan in A Different Man by Aaron Schimberg, where he portrays a man afflicted (and therefore with a transfigured face) by neurofibromatosis. All, in their own way, are exactly who they are. Against all odds.
It could be said that in turbulent times, not so much due to confusion, but as resistance to change, hatred of the different, mass pointing fingers, the first glamorous awards of the year bet on what, in one way or another, rises against conventions and proposes from risk. And this, despite errors and even horrors. The awarded films—without forgetting gems like Nickel Boys by RaMell Ross, or Anora by Sean Baker, which left empty-handed—are films that embrace identity from the need for transformation, films, in the broadest sense of the word, that are trans.