That awkward moment when the HFPA listed the Golden Globes nominees conveniently ranked in order of voter support. On the morning of December 11, 2014, several sharp-eyed awards junkies noticed something unusual about the layout of the official site of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. On the fancy page where all the Golden Globes nominees were itemized on a beautiful chart, none of the names were in alphabetical order. Instead, it sure looked like all the consensus favorites were named in the #1 slots. And all the likely rivals came along in very tidy groupings — 2, 3, 4, 5 — each rung of the ladder representing the relative strength of the nominees we had all come to agree was falling into place.
This Dec 11 chart showed us the results of the nominations phase of the Golden Globe process, but clearly the relative strength of each movie was already getting locked down. Locked down so tightly that they barely varied at all for the next 5 weeks (until final voting took place last week).
One of our readers here at Awards Daily brought this to our attention in the comments. I can’t recall who it was, but I’ll find out to give him credit for the catch. This seemed like a coup. It looked like the perfect Golden Globes cheat sheet. If it was indeed a slip-up leakage then I figured the HFPA wouldn’t leave it online like that for long. So I took a screenshot of all the categories. I put the jpg in an archive for safekeeping, just in case it meant what we thought it did. Then I forgot about it. No way to prove it, so we put it out of our minds.
Last night our suspicions seem to have been confirmed. To make this more clear, I have removed 4 of the lesser categories that did not match up. (I extracted both music categories, animated feature and foreign language film — because there was slippage and divergence in those categories.)
Of the 10 remaining major bigtime movie categories, 9 times out of 10, the original Dec 11 chart matched up perfectly with last night’s actual Golden Globe winners.
(HFPA website, Dec 11, 2014)
I glanced over the TV nominees too, and they appear to match up with close to 80% accuracy.
The HPFA never released any statement about what happened. But in the days following the Dec 11 leak, the layout of the Golden Globes chart got shuffled in various ways. Every day it was different, but never alphabetical. Cute. Nice try. If anything this only made me more certain that they were trying to cover up their blunder.
Two caveats. Voting tallies for nominees will of course differ a little from the tally for the final winners. Because voters chose from 30 titles to select nominees, but to chose winners they select from the top 5. Also bear in mind that 5 weeks is a long time, and whatever support most movies had on Dec 11, we can expect that there would be some shifting allegiances as the race evolves.
I’ve heard that some astute pundits may have used this Dec 11 leak as a helpful guideline when making predictions. For example, Gold Derby has told me that they gave the leak some “guarded consideration” when they built their predictions.
So, anyway, that happened. Almost all the Golden Globe winners were announced on Dec 11.
We didn’t make a big deal about this at the time because (a), we had no proof, and (b) we didn’t really see how it would be any fun to ruin the Golden Globes for everybody.
But now that it’s all over, Sasha and I thought that maybe you guys would like to take a look to see the evidence.
Let’s hope this is new annual Golden Globes tradition!