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The Golden Globe Awards are American awards for motion pictures and television programs, given out each year during a formal dinner. Run since 1944 by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), the awards are often regarded as the third most publicized awards for movies and television, after the Academy Awards (for film) and Emmy Awards (for television). This is particularly true since 1996, when the HFPA signed a new television broadcast contract.
The Golden Globes are awarded early in the year, based on votes from (as of 2003) 96 mostly part-time journalists living in Hollywood, California and associated with the media outside of the United States. Until 2003, the awards dinner had been scheduled so that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences sent out their ballots for their awards only days after the Golden Globe award winners are announced.
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Golden Globe Awards were limited to motion pictures until 1956, when awards for television were added.
Motion picture awards:
Television awards:
The significance of the Golden Globes is sometimes tainted by criticism of the HFPA:
In 1996, a former HFPA president founded the International Press Academy as a more open, broader-based, "less easily manipulated" operation than the HFPA.
In recent years the HFPA have made an effort to reform their association and address some of the criticisms. Gifts are now limited to bottles of champagne, flowers and movie trinkets. A recent HFPA president, Dagmar Dunlevy, was a bona fide journalist, rather than an occasional freelancer. With the income from the NBC broadcasting deal, the association has been making substantial donations to film-oriented charities. As an L.A. Weekly film critic noted in the documentary The Golden Globes: Hollywood's Dirty Little Secret: "Even though the Golden Globe people are by and large idiots, they often make better choices than the Oscars."
On December 19, 2005, the New York Times[1] published an article pondering the liability of the HFPA for the death of Irish journalist and voting member Nick Douglas, who hung himself after he was suspended for lying about selling a photograph of Tom Selleck to a tabloid newspaper. He had been working for a Belfast magazine, Big Buzz, but he was obliged to quit, when his suspension meant that he had no access to interviews with celebrities and to press junkets. In the article, Douglas' former boss claimed that the HFPA was directly responsible for Douglas' suicide, a statement that the HFPA's president, Philip Berk, thoroughly denied, but some members of the association are not so certain.