Click here for photos from the ceremony and the red carpet
British recipients of the Golden Globe awards included Kate Winslet, Idris Elba and period drama Downton Abbey.
An emotional Kate Winslet picked up an award for Best Actress in a Miniseries or TV Movie for her role in Mildred Pierce. She told the audience: “I’d like to thank the Hollywood Foreign Press for giving this award to me and for putting me in a category with such incredible heavyweights whom I feel honoured to stand alongside.”
Discussing the show’s win at last year’s Emmy Awards, the New Statesman’s Ryan Gilbey questioned whether all the best directors are heading to TV:
Not too long ago, this would have looked like a knock-out cast list for a mid-budget, grown-up Hollywood movie: Glenn Close, Alec Baldwin, Forest Whitaker, Kelly Macdonald, Steve Buscemi, James Woods, Guy Pearce, Michael Pitt, Gabriel Byrne, Kathy Bates, Minnie Driver… Now, it represents a cursory roll-call of US television.
ITV period drama Downton Abbey about the aristocratic Crawley family and their servants was named best television miniseries, proving the show’s success on both sides of the Atlantic. The show’s creator, Oscar-winner Julian Fellowes, who accepted the award at the Beverly Hills ceremony said: “The whole Downton Abbey adventure has been an extraordinary one, like spotting a promising child and waking up to find they won the Olympics.”
However, Rachel Cooke in the New Statesman opined:
How is it that this much-hyped series has turned out to be such a disappointment? I was determined to love it and, after struggling to feel even remotely involved during part one, I decided to keep my doubts to myself. Perhaps it would pick up. Yes, I felt patronised by the explanatory dialogue. Yes, the soundtrack was intrusive. Yes, virtually every costume-drama cliché one can think of had been concertinaed into a little over an hour’s worth of television… Yet, now that I’ve seen part two, I’m already thoroughly sick of the bitchy servants and couldn’t care less who inherits Lord Grantham’s pile. If they turned Downton into timeshare flats, I’m not sure I would be exactly sad. Julian Fellowes, who won an Oscar for his script for Gosford Park, another big-house-in-changing-times drama, is obsessed by social class and I think Downton Abbey is a victim of that fixation: the series has no light and shade because its only preoccupation is where anyone stands in the house’s hierarchy. As a result, everything else – plot, character – has been bleached out…
This is status-quo television, uncomplicated and undemanding, with backstories that are easily tied up between ad breaks.”
British star Idris Elba collected a best actor award for his role in BBC crime series Luther at the ceremony, which was hosted for the third time by British comedian Ricky Gervais.
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