Golden Globes

So, awards season has started, which is usually such tedious crap. On Sunday, many women wore black and mentioned Time's Up, doing their best to make it meaningful rather than just a fashionable cause of the moment. I saw that several women brought activists as their dates for the evening, and Debra Messing even pointed out unequal pay to E! during the red carpet. There were other unexpected, ballsy jabs, like about the all male Best Director nominees and Barbra Streisand pointing out that she's the only female director to win a Golden Globe. Seth Meyers had a good monologue, also taking some jabs at Kevin Spacey, and doing a version of "Jokes Seth Can't Tell" involving the women in the audience.

Of course, nothing could top Oprah's marvelous speech, touching also on race and the importance of representation. Seeing the reactions of the audience was so moving too, and she pointed out the women in other industries who are not famous, yet also contending with the same problems. How sad that, instead of getting a chance to just chew on the full content of her speech, or the story of Recy Taylor she told, the watercooler discussion became about whether Oprah should run for president. Why couldn't we let the speech just be the speech for a night? Recently I also read an article speculating on whether Chelsea Clinton will run for office too, and others talking about Elizabeth Warren, etc, etc. They can't just make a speech because they believe in the cause itself; it always has to be an exploratory maneuver, a scheme for power and competition. Fucking Vanity Fair told Hillary Clinton that she needed to knit to keep herself from running for office again, EVEN THOUGH SHE TOLD EVERYBODY MONTHS AGO THAT SHE'S NEVER RUNNING AGAIN! They just don't want to let go of their delusion that she's a power-hungry harpy who ought to shut up. Fuck them.

Why does it always have to become about the bloody horserace, just like in 2016? We've got the 2018 midterms to worry about first. We've got so many things to defend and fix, including these issues about sexual harassment, abuse, discrimination, pay disparity, etc. Why even the HFPA president also announced a donation to the Committe to Protect Journalists. All great causes to invest our time in. But no, the media wants to speculate on the 2020 presidential race.


Anyway, as to the awards, Guillermo de Toro won and got to make a speech about his love of monsters, but I think the crowd did not get the meaning he was going for, of how monsters represent misunderstood outsiders, such as the characters in the Shape of Water, contending with a society in which they have little power. I thought it went well with what Sterling K Brown talked about representation too. Too bad the Shape of Water didn't win more. I was disappointed that Mudbound didn't get anything either.

I saw James Franco win, but afterward I read some online backlash about him wearing a Time's Up pin. I haven't previously heard about the accusations against him, and I'm disappointed. I would have thought this stuff would have been brought up more in the press around his new movie, but fuck, I guess it's just like how the press were careful not to talk up Casey Affleck's incidents during his Oscar campaign. Fucking Hollywood, quietly hushing up topics even in the wake of #MeToo.

We'll see how the rest of the awards shows handle things this year. Fucking Trump pretends like he's gonna hold awards too, when he'd be better off letting it die and pretending he was just sarcastically joking. What an idiot. All I can do is hope that, since Kim Jong-un is willing to have talks with South Korea, just for the chance to be in the Olympics, maybe he won't be quick to retaliate against Trump's nuclear posturing. Maybe.