According to Variety, Lionsgate's "Michael" has been denied entry to the Golden Globes' comedy/musical categories and will now compete in the drama slot instead. The appeal deadline is October 31, and nobody close to the studio is holding their breath.
A billion-dollar movie, the first biopic ever to clear a billion, a film built on "Billie Jean" and "Smooth Criminal," and the committee looked at it and said, not musical enough. As Gold Derby reported, the rule says a musical is a comedy or drama in which songs are used to further the plot in addition to spoken dialogue. So the math is this: a song only counts if it does a sentence's job. Michael Jackson singing "Man in the Mirror" in a kitchen does not further the plot unless somebody in that kitchen is solving a murder. At the Globes, the story beats the chorus. The chorus was the whole product.
The machine has been ratcheting this tight since "Ray" and "Walk the Line" won back in the mid-2000s. Now "Bohemian Rhapsody," "Elvis," and "A Complete Unknown" all file as dramas, and the musical category is a room you can only enter by promising to be a play that happens to sing. "Inside Llewyn Davis" got in as a comedy, because it is about a guy who sings for a living. "Michael" is about the guy who made the category possible, and the answer is sit down, this is a drama slot, there is "The Odyssey" and "Dune: Part Three" next to you.
The supporting categories have no genre split, so Colman Domingo and Nia Long are not affected. That is the only line in this story that matters. The machine sorted the songs out of the movie and left the actors in. Filing as a drama is the prestige move, the we do not need your applause move. It is also the only move.
YOUR TURN: Is a movie musical when the songs do a job, or when the movie is about the job? The committee has an answer and it is jobs.
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