Big Winners at the Golden Globes: Clooney and Streep, The Artist and The Descendants

George Clooney and Meryl Streep, as close to movie royalty as this post-star era can get, solidified their front-runner status in the Oscar race by taking the trophies for Best Actor and Actress in a Drama at Sunday evening’s 69th Golden Globes awards, presented by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. On a night for old stars (Christopher Plummer) and new stars (Michelle Williams), the big winners were the who? stars: actor Jean Dujardin and auteur Michel Hazanavicius for the unclassifiable, incomparable—and, on Oscar Night, possibly unbeatable—silent comedy The Artist. (Here’s the full list of winners, including the prizes for TV shows and stars, which we’ll let James Poniewozik attend to.)

The Golden Globes are an award show with the emphasis on Show. Zillions of the glamourati clog the tables and listen to the host, Ricky Gervais, insult them; imagine dinner at Newt Gingrich’s house, but with a swankier guest list. Standing in front of a set dominated by purple curves, like amusement-park flume rides, Gervais played his naughty-boy card, He managed to libel Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster, the star of The Beaver, in one R-rated riff. (Foster courteously gave Gervais a thumbs-up instead of a finger.) He also jokingly maligned Ewan McGregor, Colin Firth and his own penis. Taking Gervais’s dick jokes as a challenge, the presenting and winning stars joined in the ribaldry. Walking onstage with pretty Kate Beckinsale, comic actor Seth Rogen, said, “Hello, I’m Seth Rogen, and I am currently trying to conceal a massive erection.” And Clooney thanked Michael Fassbender, who went impressively naked in his film Shame, “for taking over the frontal-nudity responsibility that I had. Really, Michael, honestly, you can play golf like this, with your hands behind your back.”

(MORE: See TIME.com’s live blog of the Golden Globes)

Despite this surfeit of all-American kidding, the agency that bestows the Globes calls itself the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, so it’s appropriate that most of this year’s prize-winners were filmed far from Hollywood. The Descendants, made in Hawaii, matched Clooney’s award by winning Best Picture in the Drama category. Streep was named Best Actress in a Drama for starring in the Margaret Thatcher bio-pic The Iron Lady, filmed in London. Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy went to Williams for her impersonation of Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn, also made in England. Olivia Spencer nabbed Supporting Actress for The Help, which was set and shot in Mississippi. Martin Scorsese took the Best Director award for Hugo, set in a Paris train station and filmed in England; and Woody Allen got the Screenplay laurel for Midnight in Paris. Steven Spielberg shot his Animated Feature prize-winner, The Adventures of Tintin, in New Zealand. W.E., for which Madonna won an Original Song prize, was made in Britain, France, Italy and New York City. The Foreign Language Film citation went to A Separation, from Iran—which, in the current geopolitical and Republican-primary climate, is about as foreign as a movie can get.

(MORE: See Corliss’s report on the Golden Globe nominations)

Indeed, aside from The Beginners—which won Plummer, the 82-year-old Canadian, a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor—the only one of this year’s Golden Globe movie winners to be made in L.A. was The Artist, a tribute by the Lithuanian-French writer-director Michel Hazanavicius to Hollywood’s silent movies. The Artist was named Best  Comedy or Musical (it’s kind of both); Dujardin, the picture’s star, was Best Actor, and composer Ludovic Bourse won for his lively, sweeping, pastiche-y score. So foreign that the American Film Institute excluded the movie from its list of the year’s 10 best, yet so American that it was ineligible for any foreign-language tribute, The Artist now looks to be the front-runner for the one encomium it truly deserves: the Academy Award for Best Picture.

And in an implicit denunciation of mainstream-movie vapidity, the HFPA gave virtually all the Globes to the smaller, so-called “indie” distributors. The Weinstein Company, whose boss Harvey Weinstein was called “The Punisher” by Streep, won for The Artist, The Iron Lady, My Week With Marilyn and W.E. Weinstein’s mortal rival Sony Pictures Classics notched wins for Midnight in Paris and A Separation. And Fox Searchlight can boast the two Descendants awards. Except for The Help, released by Disney, and Paramount’s Hugo and Tintin, the big Hollywood studios got shut out.

(MORE: See The Artist at the top of TIME’s 10 Best Movies of 2011)

Lurking in a trough that connects two other prize-giving groups—the critics who review movies and the Motion Picture Academy members who make them—the HFPA mostly comprises part- and full-time movie journalists whose job is to get interviews with movie celebrities. The outfit’s shady provenance, which have included free junkets and schmoozing with the stars, allowed host Ricky Gervais to explain that “The Golden Globes are to the Oscars what Kim Kardashian is to Kate Middleton: a bit louder, a bit trashier, a bit drunker—and more easily bought. Allegedly. Nothing’s been proved.”

(MORE: Who are the Hollywood Foreign Press members?)

The HFPA can laugh off these jokes, all the way to the bank. NBC pays millions for the TV rights to the show, which lures most of Hollywood’s biggest names and most beautiful bodies to the Beverly Hilton Hotel ballroom to present or receive awards, or to sit for smiling or wincing reaction shots when Gervais sends barbs their way. No fools, the HFPA gave on-camera saving-face time to famous people (Spielberg, Scorsese, Ciccone) who are unlikely to be giving any more thank-you speeches this awards season.

The winners gave some of these acceptances the spin of grace and wit. Streep, who forgot to bring her spectacles onstage and had to wing it, said of The Iron Lady that “We made this for 25 cents in five minutes,” and praised not just the other nominees but Adepero Oduye, the young lead in the no-budget lesbian drama Pariah. (Like Gervais, Streep got bleeped for a profanity.) Morgan Freeman, given a lifetime achievement prize named for an old Hollywood showman, bowed to one of his presenters and added, “Though they call it the Cecil B. De Mille award, in my house, it will also be known as the Sidney Poitier Award.” Ashgar Farhadi, director of A Separation, ditched thanking his family and coworkers, telling the American audience in the room and watching at home, “I just prefer to say something about my people. They are a truly peace-loving people.”

(MORE: See Feifei Sun’s choices for the show’s Best and Worst Dressed) 

In the three-month publicity campaign that Hollywood wages before Oscar Night, the real function of the Globes is to remind Academy members that certain films and performances must be seen before they fill out their ballots. Handing out twice as many prizes in the Best Picture, Actor and Actress categories as the Academy does, the Globes often sets up two-film or -person races: The Descendants vs. The Artist, Clooney vs. Dujardin, Streep vs. Williams.

Since Oscar typically gives statuettes to Serious Films, not frivolous movies, the Globes’ Best Comedy or Musical award is rarely a harbinger of the Academy’s top prize. In the last 45 years, only three winners of the Comedy-Musical Golden Globe have gone on to win the Best Picture Oscar: Chicago, Shakespeare in Love and that laff riot, Driving Miss Daisy. (The Foreign Press members’ all-time most heartfelt winner in this category: Green Card.) The Artist might seem to stand little chance with the Academy, which has never given its Best Picture award to a film quite as “foreign” as this. Then again, it’s a movie that makes people smile, in any language; and Hazanavicius could again be joining Streep and Clooney onstage Oscar Night, Feb. 26. The mood will be more sedate, but the door prizes can’t be beat.