Reprinted from The Hollywood Reporter by Scott Feinberg on May 10, 2021.
On Monday afternoon, in the aftermath of NBC’s decision to not air the Golden Globe Awards in 2022, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association — the 78-year-old organization of SoCal-based journalists for foreign media outlets that is behind the Globes — issued a statement suggesting it will proceed with efforts to reform itself throughout the coming year, even including a timeline with bullet points of specific agenda items and goals.
The latest Golden Globes saga began after the HFPA came under the microscope in a February 21 Los Angeles Times piece which revealed that the organization counted zero Black journalists among its 87 members (now down to 86 after the April 20 expulsion of former president Philip Berk), among other demographic and ethics concerns. Time’s Up quickly launched a pressure campaign, which was amplified by numerous Hollywood A-listers via social media. The HFPA acknowledged that it needed to change in a written statement and during a brief segment on the February 28 Globes telecast, and then on March 9 announced that it had retained a diversity consultant and a law firm to conduct an internal review.
This was not enough to tamp down concern on the part of Time’s Up and representatives of some of Hollywood’s leading personal PR firms, which began emailing with each other on March 9 and scheduled a March 10 meeting on Zoom. On March 15, 104 PR firms — virtually every major one on both sides of the Atlantic, save for Sunshine Sachs, which represents the HFPA — signed on to an unprecedented missive. “We call on the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to swiftly manifest profound and lasting change to eradicate the longstanding exclusionary ethos and pervasive practice of discriminatory behavior, unprofessionalism, ethical impropriety and alleged financial corruption endemic to the HFPA,” the letter read in part. “We cannot advocate for our clients to participate in HFPA events or interviews as we await your explicit plans and timeline for transformational change.” …
Hollywood Might Not Want to Save the Golden Globes
Reprinted from The New York Times by Kyle Buchanan on May 11, 2021.
“The party’s over for the Golden Globes, at least for now,” writes Kyle Buchanan in The New York Times.
“Long marketed as the less uptight cousin of the Academy Awards, the Globes are now scrambling to clean up their act after NBC announced it would not broadcast the show in 2022 because of a series of controversies involving the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the voting group behind the ceremony.
“To name all of those controversies might prove as lengthy as the awards show itself, but here’s a notable sampling: The Los Angeles Times and this paper both published recent exposés about the group’s double-dealing, a follow-up story by The Los Angeles Times revealed that the group had no Black members, and a late, reluctant set of reforms proposed by the group failed to satisfy Time’s Up and prompted studios like Netflix, Amazon and Warner Brothers to issue statements amounting to an effective boycott. …
“Scarlett Johansson said in a statement that she had stopped participating in the group’s news conferences after ‘facing sexist questions and remarks by certain H.F.P.A. members that bordered on sexual harassment,’ while Globe favorite Tom Cruise returned his three trophies in a noteworthy rebuke. …
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