Here’s a Zen/Hollywood question: if an awards takes place, and it’s not broadcast on TV and the stars boycott it, did that awards show actually happen?
This is a question that in all my years of following award shows that I never thought I’d even have to posit. The whole point of an awards show is to have stars covering the red carpet and everybody watching at home. And yet somehow, despite all of the abuse they’d taken in the past several months, the Hollywood Foreign Press seems to have decided to make what is arguably the worst decision in their association’s history – and this is, lest we forget, a group that one year gave the Best Musical or Comedy Film to The Martian and has let Ricky Gervais, a man who is abusive at best and barely seemed to care every time he showed up, emcee their awards show five times.
For those of you who haven’t been paying attention. Earlier this year, after repeated announcements about the horrible problems with minority representation within the HFPA, several major stars announced that they would boycott the Golden Globes. Tom Cruise, who won three acting awards from the Globes and not normally known for making statements of this kind, publicly returned all of them to the HFPA. Not long after that NBC announced that it had no plans to broadcast the Golden Globes in 2022 and would reconsider doing so unless there were top to bottom changes within every part of it. And for awhile, we kept learning more and more stories as to just how unpleasant the membership of the Hollywood Foreign Press was, how much the companies that make film and TV hated having to suck up to them and treat them like kings, and how abusive they could be to actors and minorities in particular. The membership of the Globes made numerous statements that they would enact the kind of changes they needed.
Well, we can all see how well that worked out. Because earlier this month, the Hollywood Foreign Press announced that they were going to have an awards show in 2022, even if NBC doesn’t broadcast it. I’m used to hypocrisy in Hollywood, but I’ve rarely seen it mixed in with some broad-scale stupidity.
Are these people – I’m going to have to speak in vague terms because even now I don’t know who makes up the brunt of the membership – really idiotic enough to think that somehow all of the issues that caused the show lose the station that has been broadcasting it for more than thirty years are going to make any network, even the most remote streaming service want to broadcast it? Everyone got a very clear as to how toxic the Globes in the last few months. Who’s going to want to touch it?
Second of all, do you think that all of the PR firms that have since been very vocal about just how much they hate having to put their staff and clients through all of this, are going to just say, less than six months after the controversy became toxic: “Well, its October now. I’m sure the HFPA has made all of the long-term wide-spread institutional reforms they’ve had years to make but never have. Let’s give them tickets to a screening of Dune!”
And even allowing for the first and second possibilities to be realistic, how many actors and actresses are going to want to put themselves through this slog. Its one thing to put yourself through this entire mess if the show was going to be broadcast on NBC – then they could at least make the argument that there was national exposure involved. But now all of this is going on, what is the upside to walking the red carpet? Even the most moronic paparazzi are going to ask some variation on: “After everything that happened, why are you attending tonight?” And keep in mind, a lot of actresses have been angry for years about only being asked about what their wearing. No one who dares to walk the carpet will want to answer that question.
All of this before we come to the awards show itself: Who’s going to want to submit their films and performers for nominations? Would anyone have the stones to consider hosting this show? Who would they get to make the presentations for every award given all the controversy? Who would dare show up?
And I say this as a writer, by the way, who has spent more or less the last twenty years of his life, professional or otherwise, generally interested in the nominations for television awards and generally approving of both the nominees and many of the actual winners. I wrote several articles when the controversy was still fresh in which I made the argument that the Golden Globes had been far more on point with its recognition for TV awards in the era of Peak TV than the Emmys had ever been. It’s hard for me to find fault with an organization that chose not to recognize Game of Thrones or Julia Louis-Dreyfus and found the courage to do so for The Americans and Atlanta. I ended my article hoping that Golden Globes would take this as an opportunity to try and rebuild and come up with an equitable solution to make people happy. Their decision to simply go on with another awards show this year despite all of this sends a clear message: “Ignore posturing, business as usual.”
I don’t know what the reaction of Hollywood will be overall. It will probably depend on just how many representatives from the media turn out when the HFPA announces the nominations and who they get to announce in the first place (or if it even gets covered by any network or cable channel, even E!). I’m pretty sure what my decision is going to be. Who cares? Now I realize that this whole affair is probably a tempest in a teapot that only a relatively small number of people care about, but considering that for a very long time, I was one of those people who cared passionately, it matters a lot at least to me. When the nominees are listing, I’ll go through the motions when it comes to TV at least, because I do still care about it. But I think it’s pretty clear by now that the reign of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association as a force in awards is just about over. And just like so many vanity affairs, it’s the people who host it who are the last to get the message.
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