NEW YORK-This year’s Golden Globes prize list looks like a mixed and somewhat middleweight bag – though with some resoundingly just choices. It is great to see Olivia Colman and Glenn Close rewarded for best actress, in the comedy and drama categories, for The Favourite and The Wife; and for Alfonso Cuarón to get best director for his superb autobiographical film Roma, which also picked up the best foreign language Globe.

But at first glance, the evening’s real winner, and – to say the least – the surprise winner, is Bohemian Rhapsody with best film (drama) and best actor for Rami Malek. Malek was a popular choice: he is a tremendous actor and he is widely liked as one of the nicest guys in the business. The same thing can’t be said for the film’s credited director Bryan Singer (who left the film and was replaced by Dexter Fletcher midway through the shoot). Singer was icily uninvited and unmentioned in this ceremony, something between a Voldemort not to be named and a Banquo’s ghost. Social media erupted in rage that at a time when the industry is supposed to have learned from #MeToo there are any reminders at all of the very impenitent Singer.

However, Bohemian Rhapsody is the feelgood, feelnostalgic, feelexalted tribute to Freddie Mercury and his rise to stardom fronting Queen in the 1970s, culminating in their spectacular performance at Live Aid in 1985, an event which reasserted their popularity and which this movie contrives to suggest was a climactic moment for Mercury personally: a kind of lifetime achievement award, the supposed crux of a reconciliation with his parents, and a coming-to-terms with his being a person with HIV. Malek is absolutely terrific in this film: his performance has enormous energy and charm and he gives Mercury a breezy lovability in his offstage life. Arguably, the movie insists on a hetero-vanilla flavour which means that his existence as a gay man – whose identity is camouflaged by the glam rock aesthetic of the age – is a bit diluted. But there is, it seems to me, no dishonesty in the screenplay. It’s great to see the moment when Freddie hands over an EP copy of his masterpiece to Kenny Everett. (Kenny Everett! Where is the biopic of Kenny Everett actually? Maybe Dickie Beau can develop his cameo here for a full-length film!) And it’s also nice to see Mike Myers as glowering EMI boss Ray Foster (based on real-life Roy Featherstone). which takes us all back to Wayne’s World, with Wayne and his buddies rocking out to Bohemian Rhapsody in their car.

But for me Malek’s performance is a bigger achievement than the balsawood-constructed film itself – although the film is admittedly a great showcase for it. And for this likeable, but rather negligible movie to have beaten out If Beale Street Could Talk and A Star Is Born feels very wrong. It also feels disconcerting for Bohemian Rhapsody to have crowded out Cuarón’s Roma, which as a non-English-language film was not eligible for the award – although Cuarón was duly rewarded in the director category, ahead of Spike Lee, Adam McKay, Peter Farrelly and Bradley Cooper. Again, this seems fair: Roma is a kind of masterpiece and the HFPA have done the right thing here.

The second surprise winner is Green Book, a winner for best comedy or musical and for Mahershala Ali, best supporting actor for his performance as Don Shirley, the real-life pianist of the 1960s, brilliant and fastidious, being ferried around on tour in the Deep South by white driver Frank Vallelonga, played by Viggo Mortensen. This they do with the help of the Green Book, a guide to hotels and restaurants where African-Americans could stay and eat with no (or at least a minimum of) racist harassment. Ali’s poise and charisma in this role have been amply rewarded, and it is good to see this actor developing a career path to the top. But the movie itself is perhaps too obviously in the classic liberal white/black odd couple style.

Again, supporters of Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk may well be very disappointed to see that movie lose out in the screenplay, beaten out by Green Book. The same goes for The Favourite. However, it is great to see the Best supporting actress Globe go to Regina King for the subtlety and delicacy of her performance in Beale Street. It may well be that she will win the Oscar too – and in fact that Beale Street will come through strongly in the Academy Awards overall.

Christian Bale was the winner for his exhilarating, menacing and very plausibly unpleasant rendition (if that is the mot juste) of Dick Cheney, the waterboarding enthusiast who once served as vice-president and power-behind-the-throne to George W Bush. It was a barnstormer of a performance, though in some ways it would have been nice to see the Globe go to John C Reilly for his performance as Oliver Hardy in Jon Baird’s Stan & Ollie, or to Reilly and Steve Coogan jointly.

Glenn Close is the worthiest of winners for her best actress performance in The Wife – a screen achievement I have been enthusing about since seeing it at Toronto back in 2017. The role is perfectly attuned to Close’s mature style: powerful, pointed, restrained, cerebral, with a sheen of worldly disillusion. Surely she will go on now to win an Oscar? Well, she could be in for a fight with the UK’s own Olivia Colman who has risen gloriously from the ranks of TV to film greatness with her staggeringly good and utterly unique performance as the dysfunctional Queen Anne in The Favourite, a performance that no one else could have even have guessed at.

Elsewhere, it is extremely satisfying to see the best animated film Globe go to one of the very best films on this list: Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, a film possessed of a kind of demonic genius, a delirious multiversal adventure, and a film which more than any of the Marvel films, perfectly captures the spirit of Marvel comics and its late founder, Stan Lee who appears in (animated) cameo. So, mixed feelings about a mixed bag of results. For me, the take-home is Olivia Colman’s triumph in The Favourite. Their film’s team will have been disappointed not to have got best comedy or best screenplay, but it is a very satisfying win for one of the most distinctive actors working today.