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‘Oppenheimer’ Triumphs at Golden Globes as Hollywood Parties Again 

Irish actor Cillian Murphy (L) and US actor Robert Downey Jr. pose in the press room with the awards for Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama and Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role in any Motion Picture during the 81st annual Golden Globe Awards at The Beverly Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills, California, on January 7, 2024. (AFP)
Irish actor Cillian Murphy (L) and US actor Robert Downey Jr. pose in the press room with the awards for Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama and Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role in any Motion Picture during the 81st annual Golden Globe Awards at The Beverly Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills, California, on January 7, 2024. (AFP)
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‘Oppenheimer’ Triumphs at Golden Globes as Hollywood Parties Again 

Irish actor Cillian Murphy (L) and US actor Robert Downey Jr. pose in the press room with the awards for Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama and Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role in any Motion Picture during the 81st annual Golden Globe Awards at The Beverly Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills, California, on January 7, 2024. (AFP)
Irish actor Cillian Murphy (L) and US actor Robert Downey Jr. pose in the press room with the awards for Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama and Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role in any Motion Picture during the 81st annual Golden Globe Awards at The Beverly Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills, California, on January 7, 2024. (AFP)

Historical drama "Oppenheimer" dominated the Golden Globe awards on Sunday, and gothic comedy "Poor Things" upset summer blockbuster "Barbie," as Hollywood threw its biggest party since labor disputes shut down much of show business last year.

"Oppenheimer," about the making of the atomic bomb, landed five honors, including the coveted best movie drama prize and acting awards for stars Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr.

Christopher Nolan won his first Golden Globe award for best director for the film, which was distributed by Comcast's Universal Pictures.

"I am so pleased that Chris has been acknowledged because I just think that what he does is unlike anything anyone else is doing,Oppenheimer" producer Emma Thomas said on stage.

She said Nolan, who is her husband, "brings the best out in people by being the very best himself."

"Poor Things," starring Emma Stone as a deceased woman revived by scientists, won best movie musical or comedy.

Awards watchers had widely expected that honor to go to "Barbie," the female empowerment story inspired by the iconic doll that topped 2023 box office charts and went into the night with a leading nine nominations. Stone also was named best actress in a movie comedy or musical.

"Barbie" went home with just two awards, for Billie Eilish's song "What Was I Made For" and for a new category called cinematic and box office achievement, created for widely seen films.

The winners were chosen by roughly 300 entertainment journalists who voted on the honors as a part of a new organization created after an ethics and diversity scandal among Globe voters.

Lily Gladstone, best actress winner for her role in "Killers of the Flower Moon" began her acceptance speech by introducing herself in the Native American language she learned in school.

"This is an historic win," Gladstone continued in English. "It doesn't belong to just me. I am holding it right now with all my beautiful sisters."

She thanked director Martin Scorsese as well as Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, her co-stars in the story about the murders of members of the Osage Nation in the 1920s.

"You are all changing things," Gladstone said.

Other acting winners included Paul Giamatti and Da'Vine Joy Randolph for "The Holdovers," a comedy set at a boys boarding school.

In television categories, "Succession" was named best drama and led all series with four wins, including a lead acting honor for Kieran Culkin. "Suck it, Pedro!" Culkin joked to competitor Pedro Pascal from "The Last of Us."

"The Bear," about the struggles of owning a restaurant, won best TV comedy and acting trophies for stars Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Edebiri.

Road-rage story "Beef" landed the Globe for limited series.

The glitzy ceremony at the Beverly Hilton kicked off Hollywood's annual awards season, which culminates with the Oscars on March 10, and brought top stars together for the first time after six months of strikes by actors and writers in 2023.

The event gave performers the chance to mingle and to publicize their movies and TV shows after months when red carpets and other promotion was prohibited.

Jo Koy, a comedian hosting his first major awards show, opened the ceremony, broadcast live on CBS, with jabs at some of the A-list stars and their projects.

"Oppenheimer," a historical drama running three hours long, "needed another hour," Koy joked. "I felt like it needed some more backstory."

Known as a boozy celebration more relaxed than the Academy Awards, the Globes nearly disappeared. A 2021 Los Angeles Times report revealed ethical lapses and a lack of diversity among the roughly 80 members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the group that previously voted on the Globes. The 2022 ceremony was scrapped while the organization made reforms.

Sunday's turnout showed Hollywood had re-embraced the Globes as a key stop on the awards campaign trail. In the crowd were several Hollywood legends from Meryl Streep to Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster, all Globe nominees vying for Oscars this year.

Pop superstar Taylor Swift joined the crowd as a nominee for her recent concert film. Oprah Winfrey presented the night's top prize to "Oppenheimer."

Several winners commented that the talent in the room made the crowd "intimidating."

"I can't believe I'm in this room with all these people I have loved so much, admired so much, for so long,The Bear" star White said as he accepted his award. "It's unreal."

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The Real-Life Violence That Inspired South Korea’s ‘Squid Game'

Riot police march in front of the main building of Ssangyong Motor in Pyeongtaek, 70km south of Seoul, on August 6, 2009. (AFP)
Riot police march in front of the main building of Ssangyong Motor in Pyeongtaek, 70km south of Seoul, on August 6, 2009. (AFP)
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The Real-Life Violence That Inspired South Korea’s ‘Squid Game'

Riot police march in front of the main building of Ssangyong Motor in Pyeongtaek, 70km south of Seoul, on August 6, 2009. (AFP)
Riot police march in front of the main building of Ssangyong Motor in Pyeongtaek, 70km south of Seoul, on August 6, 2009. (AFP)

A factory turned into a battlefield, riot police armed with tasers and an activist who spent 100 days atop a chimney -- the unrest that inspired Netflix's most successful show ever has all the hallmarks of a TV drama.

This month sees the release of the second season of "Squid Game", a dystopian vision of South Korea where desperate people compete in deadly versions of traditional children's games for a massive cash prize.

But while the show itself is a work of fiction, Hwang Dong-hyuk, its director and writer, has said the experiences of the main character Gi-hun, a laid-off worker, were inspired by the violent Ssangyong strikes in 2009.

"I wanted to show that any ordinary middle-class person in the world we live in today can fall to the bottom of the economic ladder overnight," he has said.

In May 2009, Ssangyong, a struggling car giant taken over by a consortium of banks and private investors, announced it was laying off more than 2,600 people, or nearly 40 percent of its workforce.

That was the beginning of an occupation of the factory and a 77-day strike that ended in clashes between strikers armed with slingshots and steel pipes and riot police wielding rubber bullets and tasers.

Many union members were severely beaten and some were jailed.

- 'Many lost their lives' -

The conflict did not end there.

Five years later, union leader Lee Chang-kun held a sit-in for 100 days on top of one of the factory's chimneys to protest a sentence in favor of Ssangyong against the strikers.

He was supplied with food from a basket attached to a rope by supporters and endured hallucinations of a tent rope transformed into a writhing snake.

Some who experienced the unrest struggled to discuss "Squid Game" because of the trauma they endured, Lee told AFP.

The repercussions of the strike, compounded by protracted legal battles, caused significant financial and mental strain for workers and their families, resulting in around 30 deaths by suicide and stress-related issues, Lee said.

"Many have lost their lives. People had to suffer for too long," he said.

He vividly remembers the police helicopters circling overhead, creating intense winds that ripped away workers' raincoats.

Lee said he felt he could not give up.

"We were seen as incompetent breadwinners and outdated labor activists who had lost their minds," he said.

"Police kept beating us even after we fell unconscious -- this happened at our workplace, and it was broadcast for so many to see."

Lee said he had been moved by scenes in the first season of "Squid Game" where Gi-hun struggles not to betray his fellow competitors.

But he wished the show had spurred real-life change for workers in a country marked by economic inequality, tense industrial relations and deeply polarized politics.

"Despite being widely discussed and consumed, it is disappointing that we have not channeled these conversations into more beneficial outcomes," he said.

- 'Shadow of state violence' -

The success of "Squid Game" in 2021 left him feeling "empty and frustrated".

"At the time, it felt like the story of the Ssangyong workers had been reduced to a commodity in the series," Lee told AFP.

"Squid Game", the streaming platform's most-watched series of all time, is seen as embodying the country's rise to a global cultural powerhouse, part of the "Korean wave" alongside the Oscar-winning "Parasite" and K-pop stars such as BTS.

But its second season comes as the Asian democracy finds itself embroiled in some of its worst political turmoil in decades, triggered by conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol's failed bid to impose martial law this month.

Yoon has since been impeached and suspended from duties pending a ruling by the Constitutional Court.

That declaration of martial law risked sending the Korean wave "into the abyss", around 3,000 people in the film industry, including "Parasite" director Bong Joon-ho, said in a letter following Yoon's shocking decision.

Vladimir Tikhonov, a Korean studies professor at the University of Oslo, told AFP that some of South Korea's most successful cultural products highlight state and capitalist violence.

"It is a noteworthy and interesting phenomenon -- we still live in the shadow of state violence, and this state violence is a recurrent theme in highly successful cultural products."