What can be the silliness of the Golden Globes matched up with the seriousness of the critics on Sunday night as “The Social Network” took the prize for best drama, Colin Firth was named best dramatic actor for “The King’s Speech” and Natalie Portman danced away with the award for best actress in a drama at the entertainment industry’s second-favorite awards show.
“The Social Network” also won top prizes for its director, David Fincher, and its writer, Aaron Sorkin, making it the evening’s big winner.
In a moving touch, the final award for best movie drama was presented by Michael Douglas, who has fought his way through treatment for throat cancer that was diagnosed not long before the awards season got under way.
“There’s got to be an easier way to get a standing ovation,” said Mr. Douglas, who spoke little but sounded good, and stood out as the kind of trouper Hollywood and its fans both love.
Ms. Portman, who wore neither black nor white — her theme colors of late — but pink, won an almost inevitable prize for her performance as a ballerina on a death spiral in “Black Swan.” That film, critically acclaimed and heavily promoted, has been surging at the box office, giving it the kind of alignment that points toward a strong Oscar presence in coming weeks.
Almost as inevitably, Mr. Firth won for his portrayal of a stammering George VI. His thanks built up to some shaky words of gratitude for Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood executive who has been a master at landing his pictures in the spotlight at the Globes and Oscars alike.
Melissa Leo and Christian Bale landed some blows by winning supporting actress and actor awards for “The Fighter,” a classic boxing story. The movie starred Mark Wahlberg, who did not win a prize as Micky Ward, a light welterweight champion who was coached by a drug-addicted brother, played by Mr. Bale.
In accepting his prize for writing “The Social Network,” Mr. Sorkin threw a barrage of gratitude at an inner circle of Hollywood operatives that included Sony Pictures executives, his agents at William Morris Endeavor, his producer Scott Rudin and even his publicist. But he also remembered to toss some conciliatory words at Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook co-founder who was made to look less than admirable in the unauthorized film but did not put any legal roadblocks in its way.
“You turned out to be a great entrepreneur, a visionary and an incredible altruist,” Mr. Sorkin said.
After making numerous disconcertingly off-kilter nominations in the best musical or comedy category — Johnny Depp was twice-nominated for his work in “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Tourist,” neither of which seemed quite to fit — the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, whose 80 or so mostly freelance writers present the awards, redeemed itself by giving its lead award in the category to “The Kids Are All Right.”
A critical favorite, that film also won an acting award for one of its stars, Annette Bening. At the same time, Paul Giamatti won an acting award for the semi-serious comedy “Barney’s Version,” about a middle-aged man confronting his unraveling life.
A bit of a snub came with the presentation of the Globe for best foreign language film to “In a Better World,” from Denmark. One of the nominees, “Biutiful,” which stars Javier Bardem and is from Spain and Mexico, has had an early awards-season push behind it.
As always, the awards show, in the grand ballroom of the Beverly Hilton, wore thin as the plethora of awards — for movies and television both, plus those special prizes for comic categories — piled up and were spread around. There was a little something for Jim Parsons, as best comic actor in “The Big Bang Theory,” and best comic actress for the absent Laura Linney in “The Big C”
It was a big night for Fox’s “Glee,” which picked up the best musical or comedy series award, as well as a pair of acting awards for Jane Lynch and Chris Colfer.
The Globes show only occasionally sank to the more inevitable movie-season jokes about Mr. Zuckerberg’s billions (“Heather Mills calls him the one that got away,” said Ricky Gervais, the show’s sharp-tongued host) and severed limbs (Steve Carell joked that he would have given his right arm to have written “127 Hours”).
Mr. Gervais virtually disappeared from the later stages of the show, leaving the presenters mostly to fend for themselves. Some did better than others.
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