Demi Moore’s moving acceptance speech about being nominated for an award, let alone receiving it, was the highlight of last week’s Golden Globe award ceremony, which offered several surprises. Moore earned her Golden Globe as Best Actress in a Motion Picture Comedy for her lead role in the acclaimed but strange movie, “The Substance.” Despite the kudos heaped at international film festivals on “The Substance’s” writer-director, Coralie Fargeat, the movie is more valuable as a cautionary tale and for its excellent performances by Moore and Margaret Qualley than as an overall work. Fargeat has a penchant towards 21st century excess that mars her work with self-conscious scenes, such as a close-up of a television producer’s mouth as he’s eating lunch, which are modern raunch for raunch sake. Far from being witty or funny, such sequences are gross and meant more to make a younger set cringe and say “ooooh” in delight rather than meet comic muster. Moore does help save the day. She plays a major actress whose shelf life a television executive declares is expired. He wants a younger woman to take over an exercise show Moore’s character has been doing. Moore, to counteract him, calls a company that says it offers a serum to restore youth. The use and repercussions of that serum is the story of “The Substance,” which belongs more in the drama than the comedy category. It is more science fiction that takes on texture because of the behavior, and consequential fate, of Moore’s and Qualley’s characters, who are the older and younger version of one person, sharing a life if not a body or age range. Moore’s win stunned award followers who expected the Globe for Best Actress/Comedy to go to either Cynthia Erivo for “Wicked” or Karla Sofía Gascón for one of the Globe’s darlings of the day, “Emilia Pérez.” It was considered that Mikey Madison might upset the expectation with “Anora.” Moore was regarded as an also-ran. Which is what makes that acceptance speech more poignant. Moore moved her peers at the Beverly Hilton and Globe viewers around the world by talking about how she enjoyed success in Hollywood and popularity with moviegoers but was never regarded as an actress who could tackle the complex role or vie for awards. “Ghost,” “A Few Good Men,” and even “Indecent Proposal” may argue to the contrary. Receiving the Golden Globe vindicated the belief Moore has in herself and offered her validation she was more than reliably bankable. The way Moore expressed her feelings made me tear. She made me feel both the burden of confidence she carried, the sincerity of her gratitude, and, most of all, what earning this award for acting, especially in a field of highly touted contenders, meant to her personally. Compare Moore’s acceptance, or Colin Farrell’s for “The Penguin,” to Jacques Audiard’s fatuous, overstated acceptance for “Emilia Pérez,” and you see the difference between class and hubris. Like Erivo, Gascón, and Madison, Moore received a Best Actress nomination from the Screen Actors Guild this week. Those awards will be presented on Sunday, Feb. 23. The ceremony will stream live on Netflix. Moore’s gown was one of the most classic and classy in a group leaned more toward the traditional, a sparkly effect with a simple line. Erivo apparently thought victory was ripe because hers was one of the best gowns, a great combination of the classic with modern design touches in the skirt. Anna Sawai, given the award for Best Actress in Television Drama for “Shōgun,” and Zendaya, nominated in the same category as Moore, Erivo, etc., also looked marvelous, as usual, in a burnt orange gown. The worst dress, and there was competition — Meryl Streep, who has no taste in her own clothes, showed up in a taped sequence. — was worn by Ali Wong, who deserved her accolade for Best TV Comedy Special. It was bright red and looked as if it was run through a shredder. To make matters worse, Wong wore long black opera gloves. It made her look like a cardinal — the bird, not the prelate or athlete — or Elmo in drag. Contrastingly. Wong made an expectedly classy speech. She also set up the one decent moment for the worst individual performer of the night, ceremony host Nikki Glaser, nominated in the same category as Wong. After an evening of consistently lame material that showed all the wit of someone who can’t figure out how to get free from a peeled banana, Glaser returned to the stage saying she is making her first-ever appearance as “a Golden Globe loser.” Given that her opening monologue was basically a roll call of a dozen or so celebrities in the house, each mentioned name accompanied by a comment with all the humor of a traffic accident, Glaser was a Golden Globe loser long before she failed to earn an award. Nikki Glaser’s hosting of the Golden Globes was among the lowlights of the evening, according to our columnist.(Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP) She does get credit for her gowns. There were several, and they all worked. I say Glaser gave the worst individual performance, a miracle considering Jacques Audiard came to the stage twice. The worst group performance goes to the writing team that composed the dialogue presenters had to read while introducing award categories. Boring, stupid, lame — pick your pejorative adjective — I was surprised the stars willingly tried to read the worse than drivel supplied them. The intros were an insult to writing, to the presenters, and to the people nominated in each category. If they were on tape, I would have forwarded through them rather than listening to such badly conceived garbage. Please just let the presenters read the nominees and announce the recipient. This Golden Globe year showed some definite favorites. “Wicked” was given a lone award: for most box office success. In general, “Emilia Pérez,” a wild ride and lot of fun received most of the accolades in the Movie Comedy categories. This includes a much deserved Globe to Zoe Saldaña for Supporting Actress. Unsurprisingly, “The Brutalist,” not yet generally released in the Philadelphia area, dominated the Movie Drama contests. In television, it was clear the foreign press, conveyors of the Golden Globes, favored the classically produced “Shōgun” over the more action-oriented “The Day of the Jackal.” “Shogun” cast and crew, from left, Cosmo Jarvis, Anna Sawai, Hiroyuki Sanada and Tadanobu Asano in the press room with the award for Best Television Series – Drama during the 82nd Golden Globes on Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025, at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello) “Shōgun” ran the table for acting, production, and other honors in TV drama. Its actors were a delight as they gave their individual acceptance speeches. So was Jessica Gunning as she spoke in her acceptance speech about the difference “Baby Reindeer” made in her career. In TV comedy, “Hacks” obviously attracted voters more than “The Bear,” which earned a lone Globe for its absent star, Jeremy Allen White. “The Brutalist,” “Emilia Pérez,” and “Wicked” seem poised to be top contenders for the Oscar, the nominations for which will be announced next Sunday, delayed two days past the original schedule, because of the wild fires in Los Angeles. MLK tribute concert on MLK Day WRTI (90.1 FM) airs a live broadcast of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s 35th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Tribute Concert from the chapel at Philadelphia’s Girard College. With Damon Gupton conducting, the program can be heard live at 3 p.m. on Jan. 20, when King’s birthday will be celebrated nationally. It is co-sponsored for the 11th year by Global Citizen. The concert will feature works by Black composers including the Johnson brothers’ “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and William Grant Still’s “Wood Notes.” Charlotte Blake Alston will recite excerpts from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech while the orchestra accompanies her withWest Chester native Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” Tickets to attend the concert are free and available at www.philorch.org/mlk2025. Radio station changing hands One of the rare radio stations that catered to a specific section of the Delaware Valley has ceased presenting its usual schedule and has been “donated,” as of the last week of December, to a nonprofit conservative think tank. I was not yet able to confirm the name of the nonprofit. WBCB (1490 AM), with studios in Levittown, served Bucks County with a combination of music and public service talk programs for decades. Its owners include longtime Philadelphia Eagles radio announcer Merrill Reese, who bought ‘BCB in 1992 with Pasquale T. Deon Jr. It continues to have a Facebook page, with the last entry posted on Jan. 5, and if you press a “Listen now” button on its web page, you hear contemporary music, but the programming listed on its schedule page seemed outdated and not geared to anything current. Hint: It boasts a daily show with Jerry Blavat, who died in January 2023. It looks like a work in progress. Before the “handoff,” WBCB was an old-fashioned eclectic station on which you could hear music from several eras, including a regular show dedicated to Sammy Davis Jr., follow sports and local entertainment with talk hosts, listen to Bucks County high school football and basketball games, and stay abreast of headline news. The station was a staple in the Bucks County area since it went on the air in 1957. It will be interesting to see how it evolves under its new management. Stay tuned. CBS to premiere new soaper I’m trying to remember if the last time a new daytime soap opera debuted on a major legacy network, it was in this century. My guess is “no.” Nonetheless, CBS launches a new soap, “Beyond the Gates,” starting Feb. 24. It will replace “The Talk” at 2 p.m. weekdays on the network’s national schedule. Locally, it will air on Channel 3. “Beyond the Gates” is set an affluent African-American community in suburban Maryland near Washington, D.C., to which some of the characters have ties. Clifton Davis speaks at the “Oscar Peterson: Black + White” New York Screening at DGA Theater on September 19, 2022 in New York City. He’ll be in the cast of “Beyond the gates” when it premieres on Feb. 24. (Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images for Melbar Entertainment Group) The cast includes Clifton Davis, a regular guest on series television but unassociated with a regular show since “Amen” in the early 1990s and “That’s My Mama,” circa 1975l; and Tamara Tunie, who spent several years on “As the World Turns” and was recently seen as a medical examiner on NBC’s “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” Tunie is also recognizable from numerous guest roles. “Beyond the Gates” is the first program developed in a joint venture between CBS and the NAACP. Melissa Gilbert takes to the stage Melissa Gilbert, known for her work as a child/young adult star in television’s “Little House on the Prairie, is coming to the off-Broadway stage in “Still,” a play by Lia Romeo. Now age 60, Gilbert plays a woman who is about to renew a relationship with a boyfriend from her past. Melissa Gilbert during a photo call for the Golden Nymph Awards ceremony of the 62nd Monte-Carlo Television Festival in the principality of Monaco on June 20, 2023. (VALERY HACHE/AFP via Getty Images) While both are willing to see whether, after decades apart, they work as a couple, complications, some strategically hidden, threaten to scuttle their second chance. “Still” is set to begin previews at Greenwich Village’s Sheen Center for Thought and Culture on Jan. 28, with opening night Feb. 6. Gilbert’s co-star is Mark Moses, known for playing Paul, who goes to prison for murdering Martha in the early seasons of “Desperate Housewives,” and Duck, the head accountant at the advertising firm in “Mad Men.”