If you missed Ricky Gervais’ mind-blowing opening monologue at the Golden Globe Awards, then now might be a good time to fix that. If you’re conservative, or even if you’re just not a social justice warrior, chances are you’ll agree that it was the freshest breath of air that town has felt in decades.
Gervais, who was in his fifth, and allegedly final, year hosting the event, came to the point where he simply didn’t care about being nice to the hypocritical Hollywood Left crowd. The funny thing is, Gervais is anything but a man of the right. He’s a liberal, but he’s also a defender of free speech and an equal-opportunity poker of fun. Gervais is also a sworn enemy of the SJW cancel-culture crowd so many Hollywood swells have put themselves out as part of.
So his opening monologue was delivered in an “I don’t care anymore” spirit, and within that spirit he ignited some military-grade truth bombs and threw them into the crowd.
In one joke, he talked about the TV series After Life, which depicts the existence of a man so distraught over his wife’s death that he contemplates suicide. Gervais joked that since the show was picked up for a second season, the man clearly didn’t kill himself — just like Jeffrey Epstein. And when there were moans among the gathered celebrities, Gervais then hammered them by saying he knew they were friends of Epstein’s.
It was uproariously funny, but the crack was much more than that. It was an indictment of the moral turpitude of a place where the Harvey Weinsteins and Brian Pecks can exercise substantial control over the careers of people they use as sex toys, and, further, the hypocrisy of those people purporting to deliver harangues about what is right and good.
And if the viewers or the assembled bigshots didn’t pick up on that, Gervais just a few moments later made sure the message was loud and clear:
Apple roared into the TV game with The Morning Show, a superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing, made by a company that runs sweatshops in China. Well, you say you’re woke but the companies you work for in China — unbelievable. Apple, Amazon, Disney. If ISIS started a streaming service, you’d call your agent, wouldn’t you?
So if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.
So if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent, and your God and f**k off, OK? It’s already three hours long.
Gervais gave voice to the vast majority of the Western public sick and tired of being proselytized by Hollywood. These are people who, as he said, are generally no better educated than the general public, who fall for every idiotic fad across the spectrum of life — from colonic enemas to jade eggs to penis facials to Scientology — and whose every public utterance is calibrated to make them more acceptable to the 500 or so vapid, talentless infighters, most of whom are utterly evil, who run the record and film industries. Everyone knows it’s a sector of our economy and society that is deeply out of touch and intellectually and morally bankrupt, and Gervais pointed out the film industry’s poor performance during his monologue.
Film after film is a bomb. Most of them are made without much hope they won’t be bombs. Television, and streaming TV at that, is eating away at the movie business because it’s cheaper and bingeable streaming series are a better medium for storytelling than a two-hour film is. But it’s more than that — Hollywood can’t come up with good stories to tell because it lacks talented management. If you don’t agree, feel free to explain what’s happened to the Star Wars franchise.
But although Gervais tried to give these people a much-needed wake-up call, and set the public on fire with laughter at their puffed-up expense, his words fell on deaf ears.
There was the idiocy of Patricia Arquette’s acceptance of an award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in The Act, in which she dropped an explicitly political rant.
“I’m so grateful to be here and celebrate this but also I know tonight, January 5, 2020, we’re not going to look back on this night … in the history books we will see a country on the brink of war,” Arquette said. “The United States of America, a president tweeting out a threat of 52 bombs including cultural sites. Young people risking their lives traveling across the world. People not knowing if bombs are going to drop on their kids’ heads and the continent of Australia on fire.”
Well, OK.
Russell Crowe, who won an award for his role as Roger Ailes in Showtime’s limited series The Loudest Voice, which essentially spent six hours of airtime trashing Fox News, didn’t show up at the awards — because, apparently, of those wildfires in Australia. Instead, he had Jennifer Aniston, who presented the award, read a statement that didn’t do anyone any favors.
“Make no mistake, the tragedy unfolding in Australia is climate change–based,” Crowe’s statement read. “We need to act based on science, move our global workforce to renewable energy and respect our planet for the unique and amazing place it is. That way we all have a future. Thank you.”
There’s one problem with Crowe’s statement: it’s patently, provably false. Unless he’s trying to say that climate change creates arsonists, that is. Most of us aren’t likely going to be persuaded by any argument Crowe might make along those lines, regardless of his excellent work in A Beautiful Mind.
This brings us to Michelle Williams, who used her award for best actress in a limited series or TV movie for her role in Fosse/Verdon as an opportunity to bring a fresh take to the obnoxious Shout Your Abortion craze. This was more like Award Your Abortion. “I wouldn’t have been able to do this without employing a woman’s right to choose,” she said. “To choose when to have my children, and with whom.”
She might as well have just taken the stage and proclaimed herself to be a manifestly awful human being. “I value this metal trinket more than the life of my own flesh and blood,” was essentially what she said.
And in so doing, in so disregarding the exact admonition the host gave the awardees, Williams proved everything Gervais said in his opening monologue.
Of course, she wasn’t alone. She had lots of company.
And these people wonder why their industry is dying.
Maybe someday, when the money is gone and the movies and TV shows are made somewhere other than Hollywood by people who don’t share any of their valueless stances and opinions (and that day will surely come, because the market abhors failure and will destroy its producers eventually), the woke dunces moaning and denouncing Gervais will recognize he was actually the best friend they ever had.
Maybe. Someday.
