The most Golden Globe wins for a single movie
Repeated controversies over the last several years may have diminished its standing somewhat, but the vast majority of actors, filmmakers, and creative team members are hardly going to turn their noses up at being awarded a Golden Globe.
The biggest winners at this year’s ceremony were Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and the final season of Succession, which scooped five and four trophies respectively to emerge as the runaway victors in the big and small screen categories.
That makes Nolan’s biographical drama just the tenth feature in the history of the Golden Globes to walk away with five statues tucked under its arm, but winning more than that has proven a much bigger hurdle to overcome. In fact, since the first edition in 1944, only two films have ever managed to win six.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Midnight Express secured a sextet in 1976 and 1979, but there’s one film that stands alone as the only seven-time Golden Globe winner there’s ever been, a unique accomplishment it managed to achieve by taking top honours in every single category in which it was nominated.
Damien Chazelle’s La La Land would ultimately go on to win six Academy Awards from a record-tying 14 nominations, but it was the Golden Globes that first singled out the musical romantic comedy as a force to be reckoned with when Hollywood began its annual tradition of doling out prizes for the best cinema had to offer.
An addition to Chazelle’s wins for ‘Best Director’ and ‘Best Screenplay,’ composer Justin Hurwitz was awarded ‘Best Original Score’, with his contributions to ‘City of Stars’ alongside songwriting duo Pasek and Paul securing the ‘Best Original Song’ trophy, too.
Leads Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone were named as ‘Best Actor’ and ‘Best Actress’ in the ‘Musical or Comedy’ subcategory, while La La Land itself was celebrated as ‘Best Picture’ in the same regard. Setting a Golden Globes record and doing so via a clean sweep of every single nomination was unprecedented, and it could be a long time before any other film can lay a glove on its status as such.
To put it into context, the Golden Globes had existed for over 30 years before any movie won six trophies, and then another four decades would elapse before La La Land usurped both One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Midnight Express to stand alone as the most-lauded title in the showcase’s existence.
It wasn’t even close to matching Nashville as the most-nominated film ever, either, not that it matters when Robert Altman’s seminal satire only secured a solitary victory for ‘Best Original Song’ from 11 nods, whereas La La Land came, saw, and conquered by sweeping the board with a history-making 100% success rate.
