At 2024 Golden Globes, Here’s What’s Happening With the Cecil B. DeMille & Carol Burnett Awards

If you’re wondering who is going to receive the Cecil B. DeMille and Carol Burnett Awards at the 2024 Golden Globes on Sunday (Jan. 7), you can stop wondering. The awards will not be presented this year.

In a preview of the show on the Golden Globes website on Dec. 19, they suggested, “This is not a permanent change, with future awards slated to be given.”

The reason given for shelving the two honorary awards was time constraints. The show is adding two new categories – one for cinematic and box office excellence and another for best performance by a stand-up comic. The show also upped the number of contenders in 25 of the competitive categories from five to six.

Of course, unless the show drops one or both of these new awards and/or goes back to just five nominees in each category next year, it will face the same time constraints then. It’s possible that the real reason for putting the honorary awards on hiatus this year is that they were unable to attract the caliber of recipients they have in the past. The show is working to rebuild its credibility after a well-publicized (and freely acknowledged) series of scandals.

The Cecil B. DeMille Award was first presented in 1952 to DeMille, the director of such films as Cleopatra (1934), Samson and Delilah (1949), The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) and The Ten Commandments (1956). The award has been presented every year since except for 1976, 2008 and 2022. (The show was not televised in 2022.)

The last five recipients of the DeMille award are indicative of the stature of its recipients over the decades –  Eddie Murphy (2023), Jane Fonda (2021), Tom Hanks (2020), Jeff Bridges (2019) and Oprah Winfrey (2018).

The Burnett Award was first presented in 2019 to Burnett, the beloved star of the long-running The Carol Burnett Show. It is meant to be the TV equivalent of the DeMille Award. The other recipients are Glee creator Ryan Murphy (2023), legendary producer Norman Lear (2021) and retired talk show host Ellen DeGeneres (2020). Lear died on Dec. 5, 2023 at age 101.