Insipid journalism is the big winner in the Hollywood award season.
Heading into awards season, alert moviegoers have the chance to realize how mainstream media repeatedly, deliberately deceives us.
This week’s example is the Golden Globes awards announcement and the press’s immediate reflex to slant it politically. The Hollywood Reporter headline blared “Women Directors Shut Out of 2023 Nominations,” while the New York Post announced “Golden Globe 2023 nominations: More diverse voters did not change the nominations,” a more measured response, referring to the change in the Globes’ membership rolls that, nonetheless, failed to produce the hoped-for gender- and race-based dominance.
These bulletins might at first seem benign, but they are part of the media’s DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) campaign. Recognizing artistic excellence is not the goal. As with the recent Sight & Sound poll, mainstream media use feminism and race to control social thinking. This deceit is evident in not just political journalism but arts-based coverage, too.
Last year the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), a coterie of international writers stationed in Los Angeles to report on the movie business for their home markets overseas, was denounced as “racist” by activists demanding that its members across the globe satisfy American ethnic quotas (insisting, for instance, that embassies follow our Equal Employment Opportunity rules). The Globes were briefly banned from television broadcast earlier this year. Now, with the latest Golden Globes prizes, the HFPA has resumed its quid pro quo celebration of the industry. The Hollywood Reporter, in turn, has immediately complained about the “predominantly white” best-director nominees by the formerly disgraced and boycotted but now-rehabilitated organization.
That tired carping about representation has become the activist media’s rallying cry. Feminism, like racial difference, becomes a pretext for coercing conformity. Insipid journalism is the first result, an outgrowth of Fake News.
New York magazine joined the fray: “It was notable that this year’s nominees were once again a bit of a boy’s club.” Call this the She Said mentality, where writers/bloggers fancy themselves Woodward-Bernstein-style investigative reporters, exposing gender and race offenses for the good of the Republic.
As if a behind-the-scenes memo had been circulated, these alarms become monotonous. Variety’s Clayton Davis declared, “The Golden Globes did not nominate a single woman for the best director category once again. . . . The all-male director nominees include . . . ” He added, “None of the 10 films nominated in the best picture drama and comedy categories are directed by women.”
Abbey White at the Hollywood Reporter complained, “For the first time since the 2020 show, no woman was nominated in the best-director category. . . . This year’s nominations mark the first time women have been completely shut out of the category following two consecutive years of progress in honoring and awarding female directors.”
The repetition becomes mind-numbing for readers and for reporters. Note the sneaky, disingenuous term “years of progress,” normalizing the idea that token representation itself is an improvement. Only Davis seems to have done actual research: “In the history of the Golden Globes, nine women have been nominated for directing, with three winners in its 80-year history.” But listing factoids is a pinhead version of journalism. It’s the “making history” cliché used to prop up election results, bureaucratic appointments, and other glass-ceiling platitudes.
The Hollywood Reporter’s White similarly remarked on 2020’s “historic nominations and wins, with [Chloe] Zhao becoming the first Asian woman to win in the directing category, while [Regina] King became only the second Black woman to be nominated in the honor’s history, following Ava DuVernay’s 2014 nomination for Selma.” This pretend evolution is not advancement when it praises mediocrity.
As always happens in the political takeover of the arts, it’s the powerful and moneyed who benefit — filmmakers promoted by the most expensive ad campaigns, same as politicians favored by the wealthiest, most extravagant donors. (The history of the Golden Globes is rife with stories of studios bestowing swag and banquets on HFPA members. No public protests about such industry customs. Class divisions provide cover for division by gender and race.)
New York magazine cited lousy female-directed films She Said, The Woman King, and Women Talking as Globes-worthy while snubbing Emmanuelle Bercot’s Peaceful, Caroline Vignal’s My Donkey, My Love & I, and Rosalind Ross, who directed Father Stu, a superb but out-of-favor conservative film. Last year, 86-year-old Eleanor Coppola, who directed the excellent Love Is Love Is Love, didn’t fit the #MeToo profile and was similarly ignored by the HFPA and the media.
Variety’s Davis did include an irony: the quote by HFPA president Helen Hoehne that this year’s films were “voted on by a majority of women and those who self-identify as ethnically diverse, representing 62 countries around the world.” But when public behavior is made compulsory, it’s never enough for the bad-faith authoritarian media.