It’s safe to say that the Golden Globes are not what they used to be. For many years, the Golden Globes were the antithesis of the Oscars. Where the Oscars were stodgy and proper, the Golden Globes always had an edge to them. People still got dressed up, but at the Oscars, everyone stays in their seat, and there is a fair amount of pageantry to the proceedings. At the Golden Globes, people get up and mingle, and the host is often irreverent.

Say what you want about the Hollywood Foreign Press and the issues they’ve had over the past few years that led to their ultimate demise. They used to put on a great awards show.

Nikki Glaser was terrific as the show’s host and MC. She was funny and just irreverent enough to make us remember the good old days. But then there was some weird stuff going on outside of Glaser’s excellent performance.

The camera angles on presenters offered a kind of fish-eye view that was distracting and disconcerting. The writing for the presenters was also subpar. Many of the jokes fell flat to the point of being uncomfortable. The overall show lacked the entertainment value of its HFP predecessors.

Then there were the awards.

Just focusing on the awards for cinema, there were some headscratchers. Admittedly, I still need to see The Brutalist. By all accounts, it’s fantastic and I’m looking forward to seeing it. So far, my favorite film of the year is Conclave, and while I was glad to see it win Best Screenplay, I felt like it should have at least won Best Score, if not Best Motion Picture Drama.

But the real snub of the night went to Wicked. I don’t know who votes for these things anymore, but whoever voted for Emilia Perez over Wicked should be ashamed of themselves. If ever there was a prototypical movie that was made to win Best Musical or Comedy, it was Wicked. And I don’t want to hear about how they’re probably waiting for Wicked II to come out and award it then so it’s like an achievement for both. That’s nonsense. Wicked was the best musical and the best comedy to come out this year, and it deserved to win that award.

Nor do I want to hear about how it won for Cinematic and Box Office Achievement. They might as well name that award Best Blockbuster and treat it like the consolation prize that it is. Wicked deserved way better than that.

There were plenty of other head-scratching moves like Flow winning Best Animated Feature over Inside Out 2 and The Wild Robot. It used to be that the Golden Globes kicked off awards season as a preview of what was to come. If this is what we’re going to see for the rest of the awards season, it will be a strange year indeed.