The Golden Globes will start awards season on Sunday, three months after Harvey Weinstein was exposed as a sexual predator and serial abuser. Reeling from #MeToo, which felled many men in Weinstein’s wake, the industry’s annual celebration comes when almost nobody finds it worth celebrating.
Self-celebration, with all the gloss and surface beauty that separates Tinseltown from ordinary people, will almost certainly erode even the low esteem in which Hollywood is already held.
Awards shows have dwindled into pompous and dreary exercises in virtue signaling by secular sermonizers. Members of one of the wealthiest communities in the country clasp their trophies as licenses to preach politics over the heads of their approving peers into the homes of an increasingly irritated country.
A snapshot of this tradition’s ugly optics is the image of Roman Polanski, a convicted child rapist, winning a 30-second standing ovation at the Academy Awards in 2003 while he skulked abroad, evading the short arm of American law.
Among those applauding were Weinstein and Meryl Streep. Streep, an outspoken feminist who nevertheless used to refer to Weinstein as “God,” has drawn attention to the alleged sexual predations of President Trump. Yet, she doesn't “want to hear” discussion about her own long and suspicious failure to recognize what kind of man Weinstein was.
She swiftly pivots to her political opponents, but judgment, like charity, should start at home. In other words, it is time for Hollywood and its glitterati to look, clear-eyed, at what the industry is itself. Then, perhaps, its pronouncements on policy and the faults of others might acquire some credibility.
Weinstein, and several others like him, benefited from a vast network of enablers whose complicity lasted decades. Hollywood is a place, an industry, that has tolerated and even joked about the mistreatment of women, even while lecturing others not to do so.
Weinstein himself once claimed that Hollywood “had the best moral compass.” Well, hubris is followed by nemesis, and it's time for the entertainment industry to find some humility and undertake some serious introspection.
Should we expect that at Sunday's awards? It would be nice to think so, but we'll probably get the usual preening scorn about conservative mores and the current occupant of the White House.
