Attention Golden Globes Voters: ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ Is Your Best Comedy Movie of 2018

It’s awards season! The most wonderful time of the year! The time of the year when beautiful actresses don beautiful dresses and beautiful actors all wear the same indistinguishable tux and then gather in various ballrooms and theaters to make speeches and watch clip montages. It’s also the time of year when dramas masquerade as comedies and musicals masquerade as dramas, all in service of the award-season strategists and publicists who are trying to angle their clients into the best position for eventual Oscar nominations. Which is where the Golden Globes come into play.

Every year, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association bestows their movie awards in both Drama and Musical/Comedy categories, doubling the chances for films and actors to be nominated and requiring movies to declare themselves as one or another. And if you think the drama/comedy divide is a thin gray line in television, movies — especially good ones! — are even more complicated genre blends. So what often happens is that light dramas or elaborate comedies with high production values tend to dominate the Musical/Comedy categories, crowding out either broad comedies or the even more endangered species, the romantic comedy. It’s a shame every year when that happens, but know this: if it happens to Crazy Rich Asians in the year 2018, there will be hell to pay.

It’s not that the artier, more dramatic comedies are bad movies. A quick perusal of the top contenders:

• The Favourite: Director Yorgos Lanthimos takes a step back from the bleak horror of last year’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer and reunites with two stars from The Lobster, Olivia Colman and Rachel Weisz. Colman plays the English Queen Anne, whose reign weathered myriad health problems and a tumultuous personal life, including a love affair/power struggle with the Duchess of Marlborough (Weisz). Into this dynamic steps Emma Stone as an outsider whose survival depends on breaking into these bonds of lust and power. It’s a terrifically funny film but also features lavish sets and costumes and dark turns of plot that make it a lot easier for awards voters to say “IMPORTANT!”
• Green Book: That this Viggo Mortensen/Mahershala Ali road-trip through the racist deep south in the 1960s is depicted lightly enough to qualify even as a borderline comedy is probably a big reason why not everybody is going to love this movie. But if its People’s Choice Award win at the Toronto Film Festival is any indication, a lot of other people are going to love it.
• Vice: That director Adam McKay’s follow-up to The Big Short about the life and career of Vice-President Dick Cheney already looks absurd is perhaps reason enough to qualify it as a comedy.

There’s also Mary Poppins Returns (a musical first and foremost, but a comedic one for sure), Eighth Grade(a perfectly wonderful dramady whose success in any arena should not be dismissed), and a few other outside contenders. And then there’s Crazy Rich Asians, which by all other indications should be a shoo-in. It’s a $173 million blockbuster that was a huge summer sensation, and not for nothing but it’s not like Asian talent tends to walk away from award shows with their arms full of trophies every year. This would be a huge stamp of approval that would be a long time coming. All of this is true. And yet it’s also ancillary to the fact that Crazy Rich Asians DESERVES the Golden Globe this year.

For one thing, in this year where the romantic comedy made such an enthusiastic comeback, with movies like Netflix’s Set It Up and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (the latter of which would make for a REAL interesting dark-horse Globe nominee, in either Best Picture or Best Actress for Lana Condor — stick in a pin in that idea, Globes voters), nominating the year’s most lavish, gorgeously-appointed, perfectly cast and performed, mega-crowd-pleasing romantic comedy is the only correct choice. If the Netflix movies were the meat and potatoes of this genre, Crazy Rich Asians is the steak adorned with truffles and gold leaf. It’s the main event, the star of the show, and the shining star of the genre. No screen romance was more fun or satisfying to watch come back together in the end than Rachel and Nick (Henry Golding), and if the rom-com is indeed back, then the Golden Globes have to return to their Sleepless in Seattle days of saving a spot in their top five for the cream of that genre’s crop.

And while you’re at it, there is no universe where Constance Wu’s performance as Rachel Chu isn’t one of the top 5 performances by an actress in a comedy. Her competition is going to be fierce, even with major Oscar contender Lady Gaga bizarrely competing in the Drama categories (A Star Is Born is a musical! Stop running from this!). Not only will the aforementioned Olivia Colman contend, but Emily Blunt for Mary Poppins, Elsie Fisher for Eighth Grade, and Lily James (Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, ANOTHER great rom-com, though that film’s genre is closer to “joy explosion” than anything else). Wu has spent the last several years getting passed over for Emmy nominations for her brilliant performance on ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat. To pass her over again for what deserves to be her mega-breakthrough movie role would be legitimately cruel.

Make this happen, Globes voters. Do the right thing. The rom-com is back, and Crazy Rich Asians is its award-worthy ambassador.