Awards celebration has mingled with dissent before — like at last year’s Globes, just before the inauguration of Donald J. Trump. (He still took a few digs this year.)

It’s something else for the usually frothy Globes to be held at a moment when the industry, or at least a portion of it, is dissenting against itself.

The unsteady balance was apparent from the first footsteps on the red carpet. There were fewer questions about who the stars were wearing, and more about why. (Again, the women fielded a lot more of those questions than the men.)

But there was dissonance, too, in an awards-media system not usually equipped to handle matters weightier than a champagne bubble. “Let me just tell you, our coverage is woke!” said the E! correspondent Justin Sylvester, by way of introducing the 360-degree camera at the celebrity arrival area.

When woke met woke, it was sometimes a rude awakening. On the E! red-carpet special, Debra Messing called out the network for its treatment of its former news host Catt Sadler, who said she left E! because of a gender pay gap. “I was so shocked to hear that E! doesn’t believe in paying their female co-host the same as their male co-host,” Ms. Messing said.

For much of the night, though, it was a surprisingly ordinary Golden Globes. It wasn’t quite a celebration; it wasn’t entirely a protest. (Even the black color scheme — a visual statement for the women, less so for the ordinarily tux-clad men — conveyed the feeling of a half-demonstration.) The Golden Globes always pitches itself as a televised party, but what kind?

Maybe, as the color scheme suggested, the awards were meant to be a wake for a system of victimization. But it will be a good number of awards cycles, after the black outfits are put away, before we know if it’s quite dead.