The announcement of the 83rd Golden Globe Award nominations for 2025 served as a stark reminder of the critical divide between mainstream cultural influence and institutional prestige. While the year 2025 heralded a robust entry of combat sports narratives into cinema, the resulting nominations delivered a highly segmented verdict, celebrating a physical transformation while conspicuously ignoring an undeniable juggernaut of global digital conversation.
The primary success story belonged to a man often defined by spectacle: Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. Conversely, two other major figures tied to the fight world—actress Sydney Sweeney and podcasting behemoth Joe Rogan—found themselves on the outside looking in, despite popular recognition and commercial metrics that spoke volumes.
The Champion’s New Belt: Johnson’s Shift to Prestige Drama
Dwayne Johnson secured a nomination for Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Drama category for his challenging role as MMA legend Mark Kerr in the biopic, The Smashing Machine. This nomination is particularly significant as it marks Johnson’s first-ever Golden Globe recognition, confirming a successful pivot from his established career as an action icon and commercial guarantor.
Kerr’s life, marked by athletic achievement and a highly public struggle with addiction, offered Johnson a weighty dramatic platform. Despite the film itself reportedly underperforming at the box office, the critical community embraced Johnson’s nuanced portrayal of vulnerability and physical decline—a notable departure from his standard indestructible persona. Johnson himself focused on the gravity of the subject matter, noting that the nomination represented the universal struggle against personal demons.
Johnson joins a competitive field, standing alongside esteemed actors like Joel Edgerton and Michael B. Jordan. For many observers, this recognition is less about box office success and more about acknowledging the risks inherent in an A-list star embracing a demanding, non-commercial role.
The Canvas Unfinished: Sweeney and the Box Office Knockout
While Johnson celebrated, the fate of another high-profile combat sports biopic proved less favorable. Sydney Sweeney’s portrayal of boxing trailblazer Christy Martin in the film Christy failed to secure a Golden Globe nomination.
Reviews for Christy were mixed, a critical reception that appears to have been compounded by a poor commercial performance. The film generated just $1.3 million during its opening weekend in North America, resulting in one of the worst wide-release debuts on record. In Hollywood’s complex calculus, a disappointing box office return often translates into a lack of awards season momentum, regardless of the merits of the lead performance.
Though Sweeney received some individual plaudits for embodying the physicality and emotional depth of the boxing icon, the film’s overall failure to connect commercially or critically at a high-enough level left her off the final nomination list. The message from the nominating body appears clear: even strong performances can be overshadowed by the surrounding financial and critical context of the project.
The Quiet Snub of the World’s Loudest Microphone
Perhaps the most baffling omission in the 2025 nominations came in the podcast category. The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE), hosted by UFC commentator Joe Rogan, was notably excluded from the Best Podcast category.
Technically speaking, JRE should have been an automatic frontrunner. Data confirms that Rogan’s show was the most listened-to podcast across all major platforms—Apple, Spotify, and YouTube—throughout 2025. This means that Rogan’s audience dwarfed the collective listenership of many nominated shows, including titles like Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard and Smartless.
The snub highlights the institutional tendency to separate overwhelming popularity from artistic or critical validation. Rogan’s podcast, while commercially unprecedented, frequently finds itself embroiled in high-profile cultural debates and attracts criticism for interviewing controversial figures or discussing polarizing topics. This pattern suggests the omission may stem not from a lack of technical quality or influence, but rather from a deliberate institutional choice to avoid sanctioning a program deemed culturally or politically contentious.
The Golden Globes, in this instance, chose prestige and cultural alignment over pure metrics of audience engagement, applying what can be viewed as a “controversy tax” to the undisputed king of the digital audio landscape.
A Fight for Prestige
The 2025 Golden Globe nominations underscore the complex relationship between the hyper-masculine, often challenging world of combat sports and the established glamour of Hollywood. Dwayne Johnson’s nomination validates his personal and professional risk, positioning him as a serious dramatic contender.
Meanwhile, the snubs of Sweeney and Rogan reveal where the boundaries of acceptance lie. For Sweeney, commercial failure may have been the deciding factor. For Rogan, the barrier is likely ideological. As the world awaits the awards ceremony at The Beverly Hilton hotel on January 11, the fight realm can at least rest assured that one of its biggest stars has successfully earned a seat at the elite table.
