If being watched by precisely no one was any kind of excuse for the Golden Globes to go rogue, you’d never know it from the winners they announced last night. Almost across the board, they were guessable: the big favourites in Drama (Jane Campion’s brooding Western chamber-piece The Power of the Dog) and Comedy/Musical (Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story remake) both cleaned up. 

Among the film acting wins, three out of six were from that pair, while Will Smith was a cinch for his award-me-now role as the Williams sisters’ dad in King Richard. Andrew Garfield handily cemented runner-up status in the Oscar race by scoring Best Actor in his category, for the Netflix musical tick, tick… BOOM!.

Perhaps the only marginal eye-widener was a snub for Kristen Stewart, a Best Actress favourite this season for her witty, irreverent Princess Diana. The Globes clearly weren’t enamoured of Spencer – besides Stewart’s nomination, it got zero – and looked to a rival biopic by singling out Nicole Kidman instead, for her curious turn as Lucille Ball in Aaron Sorkin’s Being the Ricardos.

The degree to which any of these winners will be celebrating is debatable – remember, Tom Cruise returned all three of his Golden Globes last year, and Kidman now has a grand total of six (two of them for Big Little Lies) to use as doorstops around the house. Really, though, it’s hard to say if anyone’s taking much notice of them at all. It’s not so much that they “mean” anything for the Oscars, in terms of active influence; now more than ever, they just seem to be playing a trivial guessing game.

Reading between the lines, it does feel like Kenneth Branagh’s memoir-drama Belfast is slipping. It had tied The Power of the Dog for the greatest number of nominations (seven), but only took away Best Screenplay. It will certainly be hard for Branagh to dislodge Campion, a runaway favourite for the Best Director Oscar who’s likely to shoo off all her male rivals: when the nominations come out, she’ll be the only woman ever to contend a second time, after The Piano. Back in 1994, Spielberg was unbeatable for Schindler’s List, but when the rematch happens this year, it would be quite a shock if it weren’t called in her favour.