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I used to love film awards season. Sniggering at preposterously insincere speeches, barely-disguised grimaces of defeat and tics of panic in always-on faces about how to respond to off-colour remarks. Awards season used to provide respite from hard news and the ugly banter of political division.
Nowadays, however, film fans have to endure sanctimony and partisan lectures from disingenuous egomaniacs. Like Meryl Streep. Collecting a lifetime achievement Golden Globe, she used her acceptance to make an anti-Trump speech in front of like-minded peacocks. He responded like a child as usual, ensuring world media coverage for both of them that overshadowed the awards themselves.
Now I like Meryl Streep the actor, but I don’t really care about her world view. Nobody is going to change their mind on something because the woman from the Abba musical has an opinion. Her polemical sermon in front of adoring cronies displayed no courage, coming as it did in the twilight of her career. She’s not currently promoting a movie either, so there’s no risk of upsetting a big studio who might fear a boycott by Trump fans.
Streep was deluded into thinking that holding another shiny award in a dress that cost the price of a four-bed in south Dublin gave her the right to lambast the choice of 63 million ordinary voters. She also said “We need a principled press to hold power to account” and called on her fellow actors to support the Committee to Protect Journalists. The same committee issued a scathing report detailing Barack Obama’s hostility to press freedom in 2013.
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Kissing Obama’s rump
While she was attending Obama’s celebrity-laden farewell party this week, did she look him in the eye and condemn his attacks on journalism, described as “the worst since Nixon”? No, it’s hard to make eye contact when you’re bent over planting kisses on your hero’s rump.
You cannot have sympathy for Donald Trump, the biggest ego in the room. My sympathy lies with ordinary people who are not stupid and don’t deserve to be talked down to by rich celebrities that dwell far outside reality. Streep is just another voter with no superior right to abuse an entertainment show by purveying a personal political agenda. Not once during her homily did she remind viewers of her friendship of and support for the Clinton and Obama camps.
Her delivery was curiously hammy, pausing for effect with melodramatic gasps. It never fails to surprise me just how poor celebrated actors are at faking sincerity at the very moment they’re collecting an acting prize. In any case, how can we tell if an actor is being genuine, if they’re so good at pretending? Streep’s pin-drop moment was her condemnation of Trump for mocking a man with disabilities. It’s been said before, in better ways and by more credible people.
She would know all about it, as she won an Oscar for pretending to have dementia in The Iron Lady, while Margaret Thatcher was still alive and experiencing it. Her portrayal was criticised for its chilling insensitivity in turning a devastating illness affecting a living person into entertainment. But it was 2011, a different world.
Appropriate activism
Celebrity activism can have an effect in appropriate ways, like those who took part in Live Aid and the boycott of Sun City shows in apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. Marlon Brando famously rejected the Oscar for his role in The Godfather in 1973, boycotting the ceremony and sending a Native American activist in his place to promote American Indian rights. His move angered many in Hollywood and the stars booed Sacheen Littlefeather during her speech. More recently, Glen Hansard and Hozier's involvement in Apollo House risked raising ire but helped highlight an important issue that few have the courage to pursue so actively.
Standing in front of a crowd of like minds spouting a well-worn message at an entertainment show is merely self-serving. Awards shows are a ridiculous circus focused on outfits and backslapping meant to give us a break from reality. Actors, know your place, which is on our silly screen speaking words written by more talented people to help us escape our sentient human form for about two hours.
Meryl Streep is not an expert on press freedom or disability policy. She's an expert in standing before a green screen singing Mamma Mia and being paid 17 Lamborghinis an hour. We have enough oversalaried egomaniacs with no nuance in politics already. She would do well to remember the words of her character while staring at Goldie Hawn with a hole in her abdomen in Death Becomes Her: "You're a fraud, Helen! You're a walking lie and I can see right through you!"