https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxyGmyEby40
Donald Trump’s expressions of bigotry received almost as much attention as La La Land at the Golden Globe Awards last night. Meryl Streep had the most publicized criticism in her acceptance speech (video above) but there were several other references to Trump including:
Hugh Laurie accepted his trophy “on behalf of psychopathic billionaires everywhere,” noting the similarities between Trump and his role in The Night Manager. Laurie also added: “This is an amazing win, made all the more amazing in that I’ll be able to say I won this at the last-ever Golden Globe Awards. I don’t mean to be gloomy, but it has the words ‘Hollywood,’ ‘foreign,’ and ‘press’ in the title. I also think that to some Republicans, the word ‘Association’ is slightly sketchy.”
Donald Glover accepted his award for Atlanta by thanking “Atlanta and all the black folks in Atlanta just for being alive.”
The producers of Zootopia accepted their award saying the movie “also spoke to adults about embracing diversity even when there were people in the world who wanted to divide us by using fear.”
Nina Jacobson, accepting the award for The People v. OJ. Simpson, pointed out that “The trial of O.J. Simpson turned tragedy into entertainment, reminding us American justice is anything but blind when race, celebrity and gender are involved.”
Meryl Streep included this criticism in her acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement:
An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that. Breathtaking, compassionate work.
But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good; there was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh, and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose. O.K., go on with it.
O.K., this brings me to the press. We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call him on the carpet for every outrage. That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in the Constitution. So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood Foreign Press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists, because we’re gonna need them going forward, and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.
Streep’s receipt of the Cecil B. DeMille Award, along with her well known accomplishments, made Trump’s usual attacks on his critics as “losers” appear even more absurd than usual. Soon after Streep’s speech, Trump gave a brief interview calling Streep “a Hillary lover” and saying he was “not surprised” that he had come under attack from “liberal movie people.” Trump later called her “one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood,” and “a Hillary flunky who lost big.”
While Trump is correct that Streep supported Clinton, it is not necessary to support Clinton to object to Trump’s bullying and bigotry. Mocking the disabled is wrong, regardless of other views on the candidates. While Trump also denied that he had made fun of a handicapped reporter, PolitiFact previously verified the accuracy of this.