In his opening monologue, Jo Koy made a return to the Hollywood tradition of mild celebrity teasing from the awards show stage, staying away from any mention of the Golden Globes’ recent troubled history involving race and ethics.
The comic’s monologue struck a far less provocative tone than last year’s, when the show’s host, Jerrod Carmichael, used his opening minutes to address the voting body’s lack of Black members, saying that he had been hired only because he is Black. (That organization, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, has been dissolved and private ownership has taken over the Globes.)
On Sunday, Koy jokes were more traditional, focusing on long movie running times; Ozempic, Hollywood’s favorite weight-loss drug; Robert De Niro and the birth of his latest child when he was 80; and in a personal anecdote, how Koy rushed to watch the nominees after telling the awards organizers that he already had.
“When the Golden Globes called me and asked me if I wanted to host, I jumped at the chance, and I said, ‘Yes!’” Koy recalled. “Then they asked me if I saw every movie and every TV show, and then I said, ‘Yes!’ I lied.”
Joking about one of the night’s top nominees, “Barbie,” Koy made another Hollywood in-joke, saying, “The key moment in ‘Barbie’ is when she goes from perfect beauty to bad breath, cellulite and flat feet. Or, what casting directors call a character actor.”
Koy’s most provocative moment came when he teased the filmmakers behind “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese’s fact-based epic about a murderous scheme by white men to steal the Osage people’s oil profits in 1920s Oklahoma.
“The one thing I learned about that movie is that white people stole everything!” Koy said. “You guys stole everything! Not, like, 97 percent. You guys stole 100 percent of everything. You took the land, you took the oil — you took the premise of the movie.”
When segments of the room seemed to groan, Koy doubled down, saying, “That’s hilarious, I don’t care. It’s just that the room is really white.”