Golden Globes 2018: The Sound of Silence

The 75th Golden Globes just wrapped up, very much following in the tradition of past versions of this annual awards show, with a bit less color (monochromatic wardrobes) and a bit more moral preening (they’re really sorry about all those open-secret-creeps, y’all). As is so often the case, what they didn’t say says a lot.

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Here are some of the topics that went unmentioned by the Very Seriously Concerned Celebrities™ who graced our television screens tonight:

No apologies for all the years they cheered for Harvey Weinstein. Host Seth Meyers cracked a few jokes at the disgraced movie mogul’s expense (including a darkly funny bit about how in twenty years or so, Weinstein would be the first one booed during the Oscars’ traditional In Memoriam presentation), and actor after actor took the microphone to declare “Time’s Up!” and pledge their support for the victims of abuse and harassment.

That’s all well and good, but anyone who can operate Google.com can find example after example of times when the people who spoke tonight had praised Weinstein in the past. It would have been nice — and done Hollywood’s credibility some good — if even just one of them had acknowledged their past support for Weinstein and apologized for being a part of what has been reported as one of the biggest and longest-standing “open secrets” plaguing Hollywood.

Roman Polanksi who? There was not one mention of the man who fled the United States in 1978, never to return, rather than face charges for drugging and then brutally raping a thirteen-year-old girl.

They sung a different tune at the 2003 Academy Awards. In this clip from the Oscars’ official YouTube channel, you can see Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep, and — oh, look who it is! — Harvey Weinstein, among others giving the child raping creep an enthusiastic standing ovation.

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Woody Allen. Same story with Woody Allen. To be fair, he has denied the allegations of abuse by his then-wife Mia Farrow’s daughter Dylan Farrow, and the case never progressed through the legal system to the extent that Polanski’s did. Still, the guy definitely has a penchant for much, much, much younger girls, including leaving Farrow to marry another one of her daughters, Soon-Yi Previn, who was nearly 35 years his junior.

Many of the people at the Beverly Hilton tonight have had a lot to say about Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore’s similar predilections, but didn’t say a peep tonight.

It should be noted that Dylan Farrow’s story was still heard, in a way, tonight, because her brother Ronan Farrow was the one who originally broke the Weinstein story in The New Yorker. (Edited to add: As Kira Davis astutely observed, no one remembered to thank Ronan for his excellent journalistic work.)

Gun control. Conservatives and Hollywood liberals are never going to see eye-to-eye on the issue of gun rights, so I was honestly surprised to not see any pleas for a ban on “assault weapons,” panic over the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, smears against the NRA, or any of the usual advocacy for gun control.

I’d like to believe they are recognizing their hypocrisy in advocating to restrict guns while they enjoy the security offered by armed security personnel (just like Moms Demand’s Shannon Watts), but it seems more likely that gun control just isn’t “cool” this year.

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Melania, Ivanka, or any other member of President Trump’s family. Again, another topic that I was shocked, but glad, to see omitted from the evening’s program. The President is fair game for criticism, and I’m glad we all have a First Amendment right to criticize him, but his family — especially those who have not chosen to take overtly political roles — is a different story. Jokes at the expense of a politician’s family are all-too-often mean-spirited and unfunny anyway, so the program was improved by their omission.

And while Meyers didn’t keep to his pledge to avoid jokes about the President himself tonight, overall they were few and far between. Two or three jokes from Meyers, a joke about how the Hollywood Foreign Press Association had managed to elect a female president, and not much else…other than some overdramatic comments about the Hulu show The Handmaid’s Tale…

The Handmaid’s Tale is not going to become real. When Executive producer Bill Miller accepted the show’s award for best television drama series, he dedicated it to “all the people in this room and this country and this world who do what they can to stop The Handmaid’s Tale from becoming real.”

Give me a freaking break.

Liberals have been claiming that conservatives want to keep us ladies locked up, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, for years and years. (See, Robert Bork Supreme Court nomination hearings, 1987.) And yet somehow we all stubbornly keep on roaming around freely.

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Seriously though, the dystopian tale of an oppressive theocratic state featured in the show, and the Margaret Atwood book upon which it is based, is fiction. There is no way that American women — who comprise the majority of the voters in this country — would ever vote to impose a system like that. It’s been a popular theme for liberal protests since Trump was elected, but not wanting taxpayer dollars to fund abortions is a far, far cry from forcing us all into sexual slavery.

The abusive cult of Scientology. The abuses and oppressive behavior practiced by Scientology’s leadership against their members — not to mention the insanely obsessive lengths to which they will go to destroy any former member who dares criticize them or share their secrets — are well documented.

And yet, there was Elisabeth Moss, practicing Scientologist, on stage tonight accepting her award saying, “If women get together and form a resistance, you can’t stop them.”

Four women got together and accused fellow Scientologist Danny Masterson of rape, accusations credible enough for Netflix to dump him from The Ranch, but don’t expect Moss to criticize Scientology for its efforts to derail the case.

The Iran protests. Last week, I wrote about how liberal feminist groups were embarrassingly silent regarding the protests in Iran, despite the fact that women were major players in those efforts, with their protests against the hijab and other aspects of the regime’s strict Islamic code for clothing and social interactions coming to symbolize the overall protests themselves.

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Forget the protesters standing outside American legislative capitol buildings wearing Handmaid’s Tale red gowns and white hoods; this simple act of removing a headscarf and silently waving it as a flag is true bravery.

It’s beautiful, it’s brave…and completely forgotten and unmentioned by anyone on stage tonight.

Whose fault the awards’ racism and sexism really is. The Golden Globes nominees are selected, and the eventual winners voted, by the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a group of members of the entertainment media. The Oscars are similarly run by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, comprised of the directors, actors, producers, writers, and other professions who make up the movie industry.

If these awards are racist or sexist, it’s the entertainment industry’s fault.

They literally control every aspect of the process: which scripts get green-lit, who is cast, every creative aspect of how films and shows are made and promoted, and then they are the ones selecting the nominees and voting for the winners.

There hasn’t been only one female director to ever win a Golden Globe because of Donald Trump or George Bush or any other mean scary white male Republican, but because that’s what Hollywood did to itself.

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If it’s still noteworthy that Sterling K. Brown won a Best Actor in a TV Drama award — and it was very, very well-deserved; he’s excellent in This Is Us — then those folks in La-La Land need to think about what their issue is developing substantive, emotionally nuanced roles for black men.

This was a year where Patti Jenkins made audiences of all political stripes rejoice at her awe-inspiring Wonder Woman movie, Kumail Nanjiani gifted us with a uniquely American multicultural love story with The Big Sick, Jordan Peele wowed with his script and direction for Get Out, and Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird had a nearly perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes — and none of them were even nominated for a Golden Globe.

Physician, heal thyself.”

Hurricane victims in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico. The horrific trifecta of Harvey, Irma, and Maria caused catastrophic flooding, hundreds of billions of dollars in damages, destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes and cars, and cost a still-unknown number of lives. Rebuilding efforts from all three storms will take years.

Many of our fellow Americans are still living in hotels, trailers, or crowded in with family and friends. Significant areas of Puerto Rico remain without reliable electricity.

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The trendy new thing is to mock conservatives for offering our “thoughts and prayers” after tragedy strikes, but Hollywood couldn’t even do that tonight. 

 

Make sure to check out Brad Slager’s live blog of the show if you missed it, and Kira Davis’ pre-show predictions (like me, she was wrong about attacks on Trump and his family, and completely right about predicting the hypocrisy) and post-show Tweet review.

Follow Sarah Rumpf on Twitter: @rumpfshaker

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