The Introverted Politics of the 2017 Golden Globes

Meryl Streep, honored on Sunday with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Cecil B. deMille award for lifetime achievement, used her acceptance speech to make an extremely bold claim. “You and all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now,” Streep told her fellow actors and creators. “Think about it: Hollywood, foreigners, and the press.”

The crowd laughed. They might have laughed louder, though, had Streep’s dark joke not already been used, almost word for word, earlier in the evening—by Hugh Laurie. Accepting his Best Supporting Actor award for his work, the Brit suggested that the incoming presidential administration might somehow bring an end to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (and, with it, the Golden Globe awards that body gives out each year). The mechanism for the dissolution? Unclear. The reason for the dissolution? The association, Laurie said, “has the words ‘Hollywood,’ ‘foreign,’ and ‘press’ in the title.”