AfriPulse
With four wins at the 2026 Golden Globes, One Battle After Another remains the best-picture frontrunner at the upcoming Oscars. But Hamnet also surged ahead in the awards race by winning best drama over Vanity Fair’s predicted winner , Sinners—which nabbed the organization’s second-annual, still loosely defined, cinematic and box office achievement award as its consolation prize.
Hamnet won the evening’s final award shortly after its leading lady, Jessie Buckley, picked up the statue for best actress in a drama. Buckley lauded filmmaker Chloé Zhao for telling the story of William Shakespeare with such clarity, despite her lack of cultural connection to his lineage. “It was such an extraordinary set to be part of because we were telling the story of probably the most famous Brit that ever lived, and we had a Chinese director, a lot of Irish and mostly Polish crew,” joked the Irish actress.
Steven Spielberg, who produced Hamnet, began the film’s best drama acceptance speech by thanking another auteur director: Sam Mendes, who sent him the 2020 book by Maggie O’Farrell on which the film is based. Then Spielberg turned the mic to the “one filmmaker on the face of the planet” whom he felt could make Hamnet.
When accepting the award for best drama, Zhao acknowledged the way Shakespeare’s grief-filled family life imitated art for some of the filmmakers. “Some of [the crew] lost their loved ones while we were making this film, and some are still struggling,” she said from the Globes stage. “We just want to say that we are thinking of you, we are here because of you, and we love you.”
Zhao then devoted much of her speech to quoting her leading man Paul Mescal, who told her that making Hamnet taught him “that the most important thing of being an artist is learning to be vulnerable in love, to allow ourselves to be seen for who we are, not who we ought to be, and to give ourselves wholly to the world—even the parts we’re afraid of.”
Hamnet, which entered the evening with six Globes nominations, beat out fellow category contenders, including Sinners, Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent, It Was Just an Accident, and Frankenstein. Its stiffest competition, One Battle, competed in the musical-comedy categories—but bested Hamnet for directing and screenwriting honors, both of which went to Paul Thomas Anderson.
“Let’s keep our hearts open and let’s keep seeing each other,” Zhao concluded, ending her acceptance speech on a hopeful note as the Oscar nominations loom. Zhao was last seen juggling Oscars at the socially distanced ceremony in 2021, where she became the second of only three women in the Oscars’ 97-year history to win best director—following Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker in 2010, and before Jane Campion, who won for The Power of the Dog in 2022. If Zhao were to win a second best-director Oscar, she’d be the first woman ever to do so.
Last year, Zhao told Vanity Fair she “selfishly” wants Buckley to take best actress, but was slightly more demure about her own prospects. She said that she thinks of awards season as a time when “this group of very lonely, mostly socially awkward people” is paid to hang out—a far more cynical sentiment than her Globes acceptance speech would suggest.
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Source: VanityFair | Read the Full Story…
