The Golden Globes are like the fun Oscars, mainly due to a lack of Rob Lowe singing duets of Proud Mary with Snow White.

But last night’s Golden Globes had an unavoidably sad shadow looming over them. Was this because it was the first major awards show to honour the late Heath Ledger’s role in The Dark Knight by giving him the award for Best Supporting Actor? In part, yes.

But mainly it’s because Mickey Rourke decided to use his Golden Globes acceptance speech to eulogise some of his dead pets. And because Rumer Willis‘ face gives us the creeps.

There was a time when the Golden Globes only really existed as an excuse for Jack Nicholson to turn up, listen to four jokes about himself, laugh loudly and then presumably get drunk enough to knock stuff over afterwards. But over the last couple of years, the Golden Globes have become a much gloomier affair.

Last year this was because the Golden Globes coincided with the writers’ strike, which meant that – if memory serves correct – it was conducted within the space of ten minutes from a pasting table set-up in the car park of the Bognor Regis branch of Matalan.

This year, though, the Golden Globes were gloomy because of the unavoidable fact that one of the year’s most effervescent screen performances was given by a dead man. That’s right, we’re talking about Kate Winslet and her role in Revolutionary Road.

Oh, and Heath Ledger too. Although his posthumous Golden Globe and Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor for his role as The Joker in The Dark Knight had always been a given thanks to both his remarkable performance and his untimely death, whether or not he’d actually win any of the awards was a different matter.

But, as the New York Daily News reports, last night he did – and his director Christopher Nolan was there to collect the award:

The announcement of Ledger’s name by presenter Demi Moore was met with a standing ovation by the crowd, followed by “Dark Knight” director Christopher Nolan’s short but moving speech. “I accept this with an awful mixture of sadness and intense pride,” said Nolan, adding that Ledgers’ death a year ago at age 28 meant “a hole had been ripped in the future of cinema.”

Elsewhere, Golden Globes were won by Mickey Rourke – who did his weird dog-dedicating thing – along with the miniseries John Adams, 30 Rock, Slumdog Millionaire and the well-deserved double Golden Globes win by Kate Winslet for her turns in The Reader and Revolutionary Road. We say well-deserved, but obviously we’re talking about us, because hopefully this means we won’t have to listen to her bleating on about how she never wins anything any more. And that’d be a relief, frankly.

However, last night’s Golden Globes belonged to one person, and that’s Heath Ledger. It’s just a shame he wasn’t around to see it.

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