Drama Nomadland and satire Borat Subsequent Moviefilm won movie honours at the Golden Globes on Sunday in a mostly virtual bicoastal ceremony that was marked by pandemic conditions and calls for more diversity.

British royal drama The Crown, comedy Schitt’s Creek, and limited-series chess saga The Queen’s Gambit won the top awards in television. Actors Emma Corrin, who played a young Princess Diana, Josh O’Connor, who played Prince Charles, and Gillian Anderson, who played Margaret Thatcher, in the Netflix royal series were also winners.

Sacha Baron Cohen, the creator of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm from Amazon Studios was named best comedy movie actor, while Andra Day was a surprise winner for playing singer Billie Holliday in The United States vs Billie Holliday.

Chloe Zhao becomes first Asian woman to take best director

Nomadland, a moving drama about van dwellers in recession-hit America from Searchlight Pictures, also took the best director prize for Chinese-born Chloe Zhao. It made Zhao only the second woman to win at the Globes in that category, and the first woman director of Asian descent to win.

Zhao became the second woman to win best director at the Globes in a year in which three women were nominated for the first time in the category.

“I especially want to thank the nomads who shared their stories with us,” Zhao said, accepting the directing honor virtually on Sunday night. She singled out real-life nomad Bob Wells, who appears in the movie, for help with her remarks.

“This is what he said about compassion,” Zhao said. “Compassion is the breakdown of all the barriers between us. A heart to heart pounding. Your pain is my pain. It’s mingled and shared between us.”

She joins Barbra Streisand, who won in 1984 for Yentl, as the only women to win directing honours at the Globes. Until this year, just five women had been nominated in the category.

Netflix period drama Mank, about the screenwriter of Citizen Kane, had gone into Sunday’s show with a leading six nods but ended the night empty-handed.

Chadwick Boseman wins posthumous best actor

Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman, whose death at 43 of an undisclosed battle with cancer stunned fans, won a posthumous best movie actor Golden Globe for his last performance in period jazz drama Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

His widow, Simone Ledward Boseman, delivered a heartbreaking speech while accepting the award through tears on Boseman’s behalf.

“He would say something beautiful,” she said. “Something inspiring. Something that would amplify that little voice inside of all of us that tells you you can. That tells you to keep going ... and I don’t have his words.”

Ma Rainey was Boseman’s last film performance, and Sunday’s Golden Globe marked the biggest Hollywood award for Boseman in his career in film and television. He has also won posthumous awards for the Ma Rainey role from several movie critics groups but was never Oscar- or Golden Globe-nominated while he was alive.

Boseman died in August 2020, having kept secret a four-year battle with colon cancer.

British actors Daniel Kaluuya and John Boyega, and animated movie Soul were among other diverse winners chosen by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), which has been lambasted for having no Black people among its 87 members.

Members of the HFPA appeared on Sunday’s show and pledged to do better.

The usual chummy gathering of A-listers at a gala dinner in Beverly Hills was replaced by webcams in the homes of mostly glammed-up celebrities, small physical audiences made up of masked frontline workers, and a skit about self-involved celebrities consulting doctors with their coronavirus concerns.