2016 Golden Globes Betting Odds: Best Musical or Comedy

Gambling911.com has your 2016 Golden Globes betting odds for Best Musical or Comedy courtesy of our friends at MyBookie.ag.

Claim Up To $1000 In Free Bonus Money At MyBookie Here: Tell Them G911 Sent You

At the Golden Globes, there are two different awards for the best film -- one for the best drama and one for the best musical or comedy. This leaves action movies a bit on the edge, as it can be difficult to determine where they fit. Ridley Scott’s film The Martian has been placed in the musical/comedy category, and MyBookie.ag has this film slated at even money as the favorite to win this award. Matt Damon plays a botanist for NASA who finds himself stranded on Mars after a sandstorm has forced the rest of the crew to abandon the mission.

Scroll Down For More..

Directed by Ridley Scott, this film shows a hero has to use science and his own intelligence to solve the problem. The suspense involved is what makes the adapted novel (by Andy Weir) and the screenplay (by Drew Goddard) so thrilling. The suspense gets going from the beginning, when Mark Watney (Damon’s character) finds himself impaled by an antenna, and the rest of his crew leaves him for dead. As a botanist, he had the least training in survival skills, as he was just there to determine whether plants would be able to grow without water or fertilizer. Now as he has survived the impaling and has enough food to last about a year (but without any more missions due to come for four more), he has to survive. The end result is a film that shows the most realistic vision of a manned trip to Mars possible.

There is some suspense moving forward, but once Scott has the audience’s attention, suspense is no longer the concern of the film. This is a celebration of the power that intelligence can bring to humanity, both on the level of Watney trying to figure out how to live, and with the rest of humanity trying to bring Watney home, with the Americans collaborating with the Chinese, who agree to declassify their secret space technology to help. Instead of pitting the individualist against the establishment, as so many of these films do, this celebrates the possibilities of collaboration --definitely an agenda with which Hollywood would love to agree.

Right behind The Martian in the odds list on MyBookie.ag for the Best Musical or Comedy Golden Globe is Joy, the latest vehicle for Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper (+200). For those who are devoted fans of Silver Linings Playbook, this is another chance to see two actors who are gifted at portraying scarred selves interacting.

This is no Playbook II, though, even though Robert De Niro also shows up in both movies, as does director David O. Russell. Lawrence plays Joy Mangano, a woman with creative ideas who is submarined by her own family. She is divorced with two small children and has never finished college, thanks to the split of her own parents, both of whom are narcissistic enough to fill both sides of a relationship. Joy’s ex-husband and sister add even more to the self-absorbed fog through which Joy struggles to see. As in Russell’s earlier work (The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook, The Hustle and the like), the camera is always m moving, and people are always talking.

The plot does eventually emerge from the fog and the noise, as Joy invents a new sort of mop. Joy borrows money from her father’s current girlfriend. Bradley Coloper shows up as Neil Walker, a honcho in home-shopping cable TV. However, this isn’t an ensemble, like Silver Linings Playbook.

Instead, this is Lawrence’s story. She has shown a penchant for turning everyone around her into a character actor, and this movie succeeds. Isabella Rossellini (the girlfriend who lends Joy the startup cash) and De Niro are outstanding playing awful parents -- if you’re worried about how De Niro made Meet the Parents and the sequels into almost unwatchable messes, take a deep breath and buy a ticket anyway. This is a terrific collection of characters led through a story about how to sell a mop -- but it is terrifically done, and it would not surprise me to see this leapfrog The Martian, as it is more in line with the intentions of the category.

- Jordan Back, Gambling911.com