Hollywood: L.A. Times Reveals HFPA Has Zero Black Members, Raises New Questions About Ethics of Golden Globe Voters UPDATE: SURPRISE STILL Racist!
- Thread starter playahaitian
- Start date
-
- Tags
- golden globe
Ava DuVernay addresses Golden Globes' 'widely known' lack of Black inclusion
Ava DuVernay, Regina King discuss new report that claims HFPA has zero Black members voting for the Golden Globes.
Scarlett Johansson Speaks Out Against ‘Sexist’ HFPA
She called out “sexist questions and remarks by certain HFPA members that bordered on sexual harassment.”
www.vulture.com
Scarlett Johansson Speaks Out Against ‘Sexist’ HFPA
By Charu Sinha@charulatasinha
Scarlett Johansson has spoken out against the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, joining a chorus of condemnation from actors, advocacy groups, and studios, including Netflix and Amazon, over the organization’s lack of diversity and transparency. “As an actor promoting a film, one is expected to participate in awards season by attending press conferences as well as awards shows,” Johansson said in a statement. “In the past, this has often meant facing sexist questions and remarks by certain HFPA members that bordered on sexual harassment. It is the exact reason why I, for many years, refused to participate in their conferences.” Johansson continues, “The HFPA is an organization that was legitimized by the likes of Harvey Weinstein to amass momentum for Academy recognition, and the industry followed suit. Unless there is necessary fundamental reform within the organization, I believe it is time that we take a step back from the HFPA and focus on the importance and strength of unity within our unions and the industry as a whole.”
Johansson’s statement follows widespread criticism of the HFPA, including from her Avengers co-star Mark Ruffalo, who said on Friday, “Honestly, as a recent winner of a Golden Globe, I cannot feel proud or happy about being a recipient of this award.” Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos also announced on Friday that Netflix will not work with the HFPA until it tackles its “systemic diversity and inclusion challenges.” Amazon Studios chief Jennifer Salke followed suit, stating that Amazon Studios is “awaiting a sincere and significant resolution” before moving forward with the HFPA.
On Thursday, the HFPA responded to the growing backlash with reform proposals focusing on increasing membership to the organization, which currently has zero Black members. Response to the proposed reforms has been largely negative, with Time’s Up president Tina Tchen calling the proposals “window-dressing platitudes” and GLAAD CEO Sarah Kate Ellis saying the reforms “do not go far enough to ensure the organization as a place where historically marginalized communities — including the LGBTQ community — feel welcomed.” Ellis continued, “It’s not enough for the HFPA to just say that they are working towards having a certain number of Black members. It’s time for the HFPA and the Golden Globes to truly reflect the full intersectional diversity of Hollywood.”
Hollywood Foreign Press should have been the giveaway.
NBC won't air the Golden Globes in 2022
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has got to fix its problems before the network will air the show again.
By Lynette Rice
May 10, 2021 at 02:54 PM EDT
NBC to the HFPA: Until you clean up your house, we're not airing your Golden Globes.
That was the decision made Monday by the broadcast network, amid ongoing complaints about the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, its membership, and the way it selects winners year after year.
"We continue to believe that the HFPA is committed to meaningful reform," NBC said in a statement. "However, change of this magnitude takes time and work, and we feel strongly that the HFPA needs time to do it right. As such, NBC will not air the 2022 Golden Globes. Assuming the organization executes on its plan, we are hopeful we will be in a position to air the show in January 2023."
Apparently, it wasn't enough that the HFPA recently approved a slate of changes that was supposed to address months of controversy over the lack of diversity in its ranks. The planned reforms include increasing the HFPA's membership by 50 percent over the next 18 months; hiring a diversity, equality, and inclusion strategist; and establishing a committee of "racially and ethnically diverse members who will advise the Board and oversee critical organizational reform."
Actors and publicists, along with the advocacy group Time's Up, have said that will barely scratch the surface. In a statement provided to EW, Scarlett Johansson recalled facing "sexist questions and remarks" from HFPA members "that bordered on sexual harassment." Johansson's Avengers costar Mark Ruffalo wrote a social media post that said, "now is the time to step up and right the wrongs of the past. Honestly, as a recent winner of a Golden Globe, I cannot feel proud or happy about being a recipient of this award."
And Time's Up called the supposed fixes "window-dressing platitudes." "Sadly, the list of 'reforms' adopted yesterday, and endorsed by NBCUniversal and Dick Clark Productions, are sorely lacking and hardly transformational," Time's Up President and chief executive Tina Tchen said in the statement. "Instead, these measures ensure that the current membership of the HFPA will remain in the majority and that the next Golden Globes will be decided with the same fundamental problems that have existed for years."
The HFPA has been under fire ever since the Los Angeles Times wrote an exposé in February detailing alleged ethical conflicts and other misconduct. The organization said it would try to be more transparent, and even brought out three members during the 2021 telecast to insist the group would welcome Black voices into its voting base.
ew.com
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has got to fix its problems before the network will air the show again.
By Lynette Rice
May 10, 2021 at 02:54 PM EDT
NBC to the HFPA: Until you clean up your house, we're not airing your Golden Globes.
That was the decision made Monday by the broadcast network, amid ongoing complaints about the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, its membership, and the way it selects winners year after year.
"We continue to believe that the HFPA is committed to meaningful reform," NBC said in a statement. "However, change of this magnitude takes time and work, and we feel strongly that the HFPA needs time to do it right. As such, NBC will not air the 2022 Golden Globes. Assuming the organization executes on its plan, we are hopeful we will be in a position to air the show in January 2023."
Apparently, it wasn't enough that the HFPA recently approved a slate of changes that was supposed to address months of controversy over the lack of diversity in its ranks. The planned reforms include increasing the HFPA's membership by 50 percent over the next 18 months; hiring a diversity, equality, and inclusion strategist; and establishing a committee of "racially and ethnically diverse members who will advise the Board and oversee critical organizational reform."
Actors and publicists, along with the advocacy group Time's Up, have said that will barely scratch the surface. In a statement provided to EW, Scarlett Johansson recalled facing "sexist questions and remarks" from HFPA members "that bordered on sexual harassment." Johansson's Avengers costar Mark Ruffalo wrote a social media post that said, "now is the time to step up and right the wrongs of the past. Honestly, as a recent winner of a Golden Globe, I cannot feel proud or happy about being a recipient of this award."
And Time's Up called the supposed fixes "window-dressing platitudes." "Sadly, the list of 'reforms' adopted yesterday, and endorsed by NBCUniversal and Dick Clark Productions, are sorely lacking and hardly transformational," Time's Up President and chief executive Tina Tchen said in the statement. "Instead, these measures ensure that the current membership of the HFPA will remain in the majority and that the next Golden Globes will be decided with the same fundamental problems that have existed for years."
The HFPA has been under fire ever since the Los Angeles Times wrote an exposé in February detailing alleged ethical conflicts and other misconduct. The organization said it would try to be more transparent, and even brought out three members during the 2021 telecast to insist the group would welcome Black voices into its voting base.
NBC won't air the Golden Globes in 2022
NBC says it will not air the Golden Globes in 2022 as the Hollywood Foreign Press Association works to address the lack of diversity in its ranks.
Tom Cruise gives back his three Golden Globe awards amid HFPA reckoning
The Mission: Impossible star joins the protest against the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
By Nick Romano
May 10, 2021 at 03:30 PM EDT
Tom Cruise made a bold move amid the controversy surrounding the Hollywood Foreign Press Association by returning the three Golden Globes statuettes he won over his career to the organization, EW has learned.
Cruise won awards from the HFPA, the voting body behind the Globes, in 1990 for Born on the Fourth of July (Best Actor in a Drama), 1997 for Jerry Maguire (Best Actor in a Drama), and 2000 for Magnolia (Best Supporting Actor).
Deadline first reported the news.
The face of the Mission: Impossible movies is the latest star to make a show of protest against the HFPA after the group came under fire for its utter lack of diversity. This followed the publication of a Los Angeles Times exposé citing unethical practices.
A group of 100 PR firms recently joined forces in demanding "profound and lasting change" from the HFPA, while Scarlett Johansson and Mark Ruffalo were some of the high-profile celebrities joining the chorus. Some networks and studios, including Amazon and Netflix, stated they haven't worked with the organization since the issues were raised.
The HFPA recently announced a pledge for more transparency and diversification, while the advocacy group Time's Up vowed to hold them to that pledge.
On Monday, NBC announced that it would no longer air the 2022 Golden Globes while the HFPA works on its issues.
"We continue to believe that the HFPA is committed to meaningful reform," the network said in a statement. "However, change of this magnitude takes time and work, and we feel strongly that the HFPA needs time to do it right. As such, NBC will not air the 2022 Golden Globes. Assuming the organization executes on its plan, we are hopeful we will be in a position to air the show in January 2023."
The Mission: Impossible star joins the protest against the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
By Nick Romano
May 10, 2021 at 03:30 PM EDT
Tom Cruise made a bold move amid the controversy surrounding the Hollywood Foreign Press Association by returning the three Golden Globes statuettes he won over his career to the organization, EW has learned.
Cruise won awards from the HFPA, the voting body behind the Globes, in 1990 for Born on the Fourth of July (Best Actor in a Drama), 1997 for Jerry Maguire (Best Actor in a Drama), and 2000 for Magnolia (Best Supporting Actor).
Deadline first reported the news.
The face of the Mission: Impossible movies is the latest star to make a show of protest against the HFPA after the group came under fire for its utter lack of diversity. This followed the publication of a Los Angeles Times exposé citing unethical practices.
A group of 100 PR firms recently joined forces in demanding "profound and lasting change" from the HFPA, while Scarlett Johansson and Mark Ruffalo were some of the high-profile celebrities joining the chorus. Some networks and studios, including Amazon and Netflix, stated they haven't worked with the organization since the issues were raised.
The HFPA recently announced a pledge for more transparency and diversification, while the advocacy group Time's Up vowed to hold them to that pledge.
On Monday, NBC announced that it would no longer air the 2022 Golden Globes while the HFPA works on its issues.
"We continue to believe that the HFPA is committed to meaningful reform," the network said in a statement. "However, change of this magnitude takes time and work, and we feel strongly that the HFPA needs time to do it right. As such, NBC will not air the 2022 Golden Globes. Assuming the organization executes on its plan, we are hopeful we will be in a position to air the show in January 2023."
Time’s Up, Amazon Studios and Netflix Are All Cutting Ties With The HFPA
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association is under fire once again for its lack of accountability and actual reformation. Time’s Up confronted the powerful group in charge of the Golden Globe Awards for their proposed changes, calling them “window-dressing platitudes.”
graziamagazine.com
HFPA Releases Newly-Revised Code of Professional and Ethical Conduct
By Halle Kiefer@hallekiefer
Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Hollywood Foreign Press Association
Following months of blowback, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has released a new, revised Code of Professional and Ethical Conduct, after the organization approved the guidelines on Thursday. “Our Association was founded under the motto, ‘Unity Without Discrimination of Religion or Race.’ Our dedication to diversity, equity, and inclusion, therefore, stems from the founding of our Association, and this Code of Conduct serves to reinforce, expand, and renew that commitment,” they say in the six-page document. “We must act with intention to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, not only among our members and within our Association, but we must become leaders within our journalistic and entertainment communities, so that we encourage and celebrate the authentic, varied voices, experiences and viewpoints of those behind and in front of the screen.”
In addition to pledging transparency and accountability when it comes to their professional conduct, the code requires HFPA members to maintain ethical relationships with third parties, take part in principled Golden Globes voting, and comply with the organization’s anti-harassment and discrimination policies. The document also points members to the new email address and phone number members can use to report “unprofessional or unethical conduct.” You can read the guidelines in full over at Deadline.
Since February, the nonprofit organization of entertainment journalists behind the Golden Globes has scrambled to respond to wave after wave of criticism about its self-serving company culture and blinkered approach to diversity, specifically its complete lack of Black members, among other systematic problems. While HFPA has repeatedly pledged to update its outdated and exclusionary ethos, it might be too little, too late for many. Earlier this month, NBC decided it won’t be airing the Golden Globes in 2022 after all, and Netflix announced their decision to stop “any activities with your organization until more meaningful changes are made.”
By Halle Kiefer@hallekiefer
Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Hollywood Foreign Press Association
Following months of blowback, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has released a new, revised Code of Professional and Ethical Conduct, after the organization approved the guidelines on Thursday. “Our Association was founded under the motto, ‘Unity Without Discrimination of Religion or Race.’ Our dedication to diversity, equity, and inclusion, therefore, stems from the founding of our Association, and this Code of Conduct serves to reinforce, expand, and renew that commitment,” they say in the six-page document. “We must act with intention to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, not only among our members and within our Association, but we must become leaders within our journalistic and entertainment communities, so that we encourage and celebrate the authentic, varied voices, experiences and viewpoints of those behind and in front of the screen.”
In addition to pledging transparency and accountability when it comes to their professional conduct, the code requires HFPA members to maintain ethical relationships with third parties, take part in principled Golden Globes voting, and comply with the organization’s anti-harassment and discrimination policies. The document also points members to the new email address and phone number members can use to report “unprofessional or unethical conduct.” You can read the guidelines in full over at Deadline.
Since February, the nonprofit organization of entertainment journalists behind the Golden Globes has scrambled to respond to wave after wave of criticism about its self-serving company culture and blinkered approach to diversity, specifically its complete lack of Black members, among other systematic problems. While HFPA has repeatedly pledged to update its outdated and exclusionary ethos, it might be too little, too late for many. Earlier this month, NBC decided it won’t be airing the Golden Globes in 2022 after all, and Netflix announced their decision to stop “any activities with your organization until more meaningful changes are made.”
How the Golden Globes Canceled Themselves
By Chris Lee@__ChrisLee
This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
Photo-Illustration: by Vulture; Photo by Jeffrey Coolidge/Getty Images and Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Hollywood Foreign Press Association
The cancellation of next year’s Golden Globes was hardly a foregone conclusion. Yes, the controversy has been mounting for months: first from Los Angeles Times exposés in February that highlighted the association’s insular culture, millions of dollars of self-dealing payments and total exclusion of Black members, then an open letter signed by more than 100 Hollywood publicity firms calling for “profound and lasting change.” Time’s Up published a list of suggested reforms. Last week, Scarlett Johansson urged fellow celebs to “step back from the HFPA,” and on Monday, Tom Cruise returned his three Globe statuettes in symbolic protest. But until Monday, NBC was still planning to air the Golden Globes next year. To hear it from a cross section of entertainment industry insiders with deep ties to the association, NBC’s announcement this week that it would not air the 2022 Globes broadcast comes down to a “self-inflicted wound” by the HFPA: a preventable disaster for which the free-buffet-loving press cabal has no one to blame but itself.
Now the HFPA has found itself increasingly forsaken by the Hollywood firmament it so long and assiduously courted. Even after the non-profit organization announced sweeping reforms earlier this month (including bringing in a Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer and vowing to increase membership by 50 percent over the next 18 months “with a specific focus on recruiting Black members”), Netflix co-chief executive Ted Sarandos informed the HFPA leadership committee that the streaming behemoth was “stopping any activities” until more meaningful changes were made. From there, Amazon, WarnerMedia and Neon, the indie studio behind Parasite, joined the boycott in rapid succession. But according to sources contacted by Vulture, the association doomed its own 2022 event with its Monday announcement of “transformational” reforms that critics immediately faulted for rolling out too slowly, thereby leaving the same regime largely intact until at least 2023.
The association has long been considered corrupt by critics and other members of the press, but that’s not what people are really mad about. The HFPA now faces the most serious crisis in its 77-year history because a bunch of separate Hollywood factions led by a lightning brigade of entertainment publicists finally decided to call out the organization they’ve grimly tolerated and secretly hated for so many years under the guise of pushing for more progressive politics.
Sources who have long-term business relationships with both the association and executives at the entertainment publicity firms now decrying it said that many publicists representing top-tier actors and directors harbor long-standing grudges toward the HFPA. While happy enough to oblige the eccentric, 87-member group of international entertainment journalists’ whims when it came to providing gifts, entry to champagne receptions, free travel arrangements and innumerable selfies with celebrity clients, sources note that publicists have quietly fumed over the association’s intractable all-or-none demands. Specifically, the association’s mandate that the entire rank and file of their membership be allowed into “exclusive” press events for TV series or movies, or none of them would show up, thereby negating the publicists’ efficacy as gatekeepers to talent.
As evidence of HFPA malfeasance and internal chaos mounted in the pages of the Los Angeles Times, sources tell us, these publicists saw their chance to hold the HFPA to a higher standard while also reestablishing the power dynamic to gain greater control. “The Black member/diversity thing was a smoke screen,” one awards-campaign executive says. “Publicists today want to control the outlet selections for their talent promoting TV or movies. But they cannot deem any individual outlet represented by any single HFPA member verboten. Get the group, get them all! That drives them crazy. It’s all about control.”
That the HFPA has garnered enough respect in modern Hollywood to merit demands for integrity should come as a delicious irony to anyone familiar with the Golden Globes’ decades of scandals, controversies and bizarro internal logic. Established in 1944, the awards were repeatedly censured by the FCC and kicked off the air twice for effectively giving awards out as recompense for favors. In 1958, ex-HFPA president Henry Gris resigned after a single PR firm’s clients took home a suspicious majority of that year’s golden statuettes. In 1982, there was the infamous Pia Zadora debacle; the 24-year-old star of the critically pilloried flop Butterfly was awarded the Globe for Best New Star after her billionaire husband Meshulam Riklis flew HFPA members to Las Vegas where he plied them with food and booze at a hotel-casino he owned. And by the time Universal flew association members to New York in 1992 for an elaborate press junket for Al Pacino’s Scent of a Woman — which, perhaps not coincidentally, ended up besting such acclaimed movies as Unforgiven, The Crying Game, and A Few Good Men in the Drama, Motion Picture category the following year — the Globes’ reputation as an unserious, suspected bribe- and advertising-driven event had become received wisdom within Hollywood’s 30-mile zone.
Once the show started to be produced by Dick Clark Productions and broadcast by NBC in the ’90s, however, the Globes evolved into a reliable star chamber for major celebrities and Serious Actors alike: a fun and fizzy awards-season pit stop unfolding (with the exception of this pandemic year) in late January, just days before the end of the Oscars voting period.
Richard Rushfield, editor-in-chief of the entertainment-industry newsletter The Ankler, said that he finds the “I’m shocked, shocked to find gambling is going on in here!” tone of the publicists’ March 15 open letter more than a little disingenuous. “The idea that these publicists are suddenly horrified by what’s going on at the HFPA is pretty ridiculous,” Rushfield says. “These people know everything that’s going on. They know the [HFPA] members by name. They’re more than witness to the lack of diversity. They facilitated it.”
Highly placed sources from across the Awards Industrial Complex called the publicists the “primary aggressor” in penalizing the HFPA and ultimately pushing the Globes off the air, which most likely would not have occurred without their continuing involvement. But as these sources explain it, the groundswell of PR-maven outrage that forced the issue all the way to the network level amounts to undisguised hypocrisy — grandstanding of the highest order intended to assure celebrity clients that their reps were “taking a stand” on diversity and inclusivity even while leadership at almost all the signatory firms remains overwhelmingly white.
Rushfield feels the publicists staked out a position of rejecting the HFPA’s reforms even before any changes had been announced, pointing out their demand for the association to “swiftly manifest profound and lasting change” held the HFPA to a much higher standard than they did the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the aftermath of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy in 2015. “I don’t know the number of times that Hollywood-based publicists said to them, ‘We’re made uncomfortable by the fact that there aren’t more Black members,’” he continues, echoing a sentiment being spoken behind closed doors across Hollywood. “But I’m guessing it’s probably a number less than one.”
Recent controversies — such as eight-term HFPA president Philip Berk calling Black Lives Matter a “racist hate movement” in April and HFPA member Margaret Gardiner asking Oscar winner Daniel Kaluuya what it meant “to be directed by Regina” at the Oscars (seemingly mistaking him for One Night in Miami’s Leslie Odom Jr.) — underscored the perception that the HFPA is out of touch with contemporary cultural sensitivities. On April 20, Shaun Harper, a diversity strategist hired by the association to serve as a diversity and inclusion adviser just days after the publication of the first L.A. Times expose in March, quit the HFPA under unknown circumstances. Criticized both inside and outside the group for his seemingly arbitrary recommendation the HFPA add 13 new Black members, Harper reportedly met with representatives for Time’s Up, Color of Change, and the members of the coalition of publicists who had sent the open letter on the day he stepped down.
If the publicists’ letter suddenly held the HFPA to a new level of accountability, then Netflix’s opposition may have been the tipping point for a series of corporate boycotts. On May 6, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos sent a letter to the HFPA that was obtained by Deadline the next day. “We know that you have many well-intentioned members who want real change,” Sarandos wrote. “But Netflix and many of the talent and creators we work with cannot ignore the HFPA’s collective failure to address these crucial issues with urgency and rigor.”
Over the past two months, Netflix executives had been meeting with HFPA leadership about proposed reforms, according to a source close to the streaming service. But the executives were surprised to see the letter published — they were not informed it was going to be released to the press. In the lead up to this year’s Globes, the streaming giant outspent every other studio, heavily promoting movies and series including The Trial of the Chicago 7, Hillbilly Elegy, The Queen’s Gambit, and Emily in Paris (for which HFPA voters received a lavish set visit in 2019). According to several sources, in December of 2019, before U.S. cities had begun COVID lockdowns, HFPA members attended a “holiday toast” at Sarandos’s home in Los Angeles. “Ted had them all to his house,” one film executive tells Vulture. “He didn’t notice that none of them are Black?”
In the end, though, it was the HFPA’s announcement of reform — and the reactions to it — that pushed NBC to cancel the broadcast. Planning to increase membership by 50 percent in 18 months, the association’s board committed to adding 20 new members by August of this year, but made no specific guarantees membership will diversify enough to impact voting on the 2022 Globes. Condemnation came swiftly. Time’s Up called the changes “window-dressing platitudes” and Mark Ruffalo lamented the reforms as “discouraging,” adding on Twitter, “Honestly, as a recent winner of a Golden Globe, I cannot feel proud or happy about being a recipient of this award.”
With more foresight, the organization might have instead taken its own initiative to push pause on the event for a year and regroup, so it could then return with all the appropriate new-and-improved fanfare in 2023. “They should have been smart enough to do it themselves,” says an awards executive with knowledge of the group. “They made the 2022 Globes unfeasible.”
Of course, the very same publicity firms who made a great show of standing up to the HFPA now stand to lose an untold fortune in fees with the cancellation of next year’s Globes. To hear it from a prominent film publicist (who, like others contacted for this story, spoke on condition of anonymity due to ongoing business sensitivities) the entertainment publicity community was hardly united in the offensive to chasten and reform the HFPA. In fact, many prominent firms (including Ginsberg-Libby, DKC, and Eileen Koch Public Relations) opted not to sign the letter. And vilifying the association, they say, only compartmentalizes Hollywood’s problems of diversity and inclusion, leading to a missed opportunity for meaningful dialogue across the entire entertainment ecosystem.
“I can’t help but reflect on the many years that came before this moment when the entire industry was doing flip flops working with the HFPA to garner attention for their films, shows, directors and actors without a thought as to whether or not the organization measured up to diversity, equity and inclusion standards at the most basic level,” the film publicist says in an impassioned email to Vulture. “So rather than ‘cancel’ the HFPA and the Globes as a whole, perhaps we should offer to engage in the kind of progressive conversations that could help lift up the organization in their thinking and methods. We — the entire industry — have culpability here and we should all play a part in cleaning up the mess we’ve created.”
By Chris Lee@__ChrisLee
This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
Photo-Illustration: by Vulture; Photo by Jeffrey Coolidge/Getty Images and Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Hollywood Foreign Press Association
The cancellation of next year’s Golden Globes was hardly a foregone conclusion. Yes, the controversy has been mounting for months: first from Los Angeles Times exposés in February that highlighted the association’s insular culture, millions of dollars of self-dealing payments and total exclusion of Black members, then an open letter signed by more than 100 Hollywood publicity firms calling for “profound and lasting change.” Time’s Up published a list of suggested reforms. Last week, Scarlett Johansson urged fellow celebs to “step back from the HFPA,” and on Monday, Tom Cruise returned his three Globe statuettes in symbolic protest. But until Monday, NBC was still planning to air the Golden Globes next year. To hear it from a cross section of entertainment industry insiders with deep ties to the association, NBC’s announcement this week that it would not air the 2022 Globes broadcast comes down to a “self-inflicted wound” by the HFPA: a preventable disaster for which the free-buffet-loving press cabal has no one to blame but itself.
Now the HFPA has found itself increasingly forsaken by the Hollywood firmament it so long and assiduously courted. Even after the non-profit organization announced sweeping reforms earlier this month (including bringing in a Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer and vowing to increase membership by 50 percent over the next 18 months “with a specific focus on recruiting Black members”), Netflix co-chief executive Ted Sarandos informed the HFPA leadership committee that the streaming behemoth was “stopping any activities” until more meaningful changes were made. From there, Amazon, WarnerMedia and Neon, the indie studio behind Parasite, joined the boycott in rapid succession. But according to sources contacted by Vulture, the association doomed its own 2022 event with its Monday announcement of “transformational” reforms that critics immediately faulted for rolling out too slowly, thereby leaving the same regime largely intact until at least 2023.
The association has long been considered corrupt by critics and other members of the press, but that’s not what people are really mad about. The HFPA now faces the most serious crisis in its 77-year history because a bunch of separate Hollywood factions led by a lightning brigade of entertainment publicists finally decided to call out the organization they’ve grimly tolerated and secretly hated for so many years under the guise of pushing for more progressive politics.
Sources who have long-term business relationships with both the association and executives at the entertainment publicity firms now decrying it said that many publicists representing top-tier actors and directors harbor long-standing grudges toward the HFPA. While happy enough to oblige the eccentric, 87-member group of international entertainment journalists’ whims when it came to providing gifts, entry to champagne receptions, free travel arrangements and innumerable selfies with celebrity clients, sources note that publicists have quietly fumed over the association’s intractable all-or-none demands. Specifically, the association’s mandate that the entire rank and file of their membership be allowed into “exclusive” press events for TV series or movies, or none of them would show up, thereby negating the publicists’ efficacy as gatekeepers to talent.
As evidence of HFPA malfeasance and internal chaos mounted in the pages of the Los Angeles Times, sources tell us, these publicists saw their chance to hold the HFPA to a higher standard while also reestablishing the power dynamic to gain greater control. “The Black member/diversity thing was a smoke screen,” one awards-campaign executive says. “Publicists today want to control the outlet selections for their talent promoting TV or movies. But they cannot deem any individual outlet represented by any single HFPA member verboten. Get the group, get them all! That drives them crazy. It’s all about control.”
That the HFPA has garnered enough respect in modern Hollywood to merit demands for integrity should come as a delicious irony to anyone familiar with the Golden Globes’ decades of scandals, controversies and bizarro internal logic. Established in 1944, the awards were repeatedly censured by the FCC and kicked off the air twice for effectively giving awards out as recompense for favors. In 1958, ex-HFPA president Henry Gris resigned after a single PR firm’s clients took home a suspicious majority of that year’s golden statuettes. In 1982, there was the infamous Pia Zadora debacle; the 24-year-old star of the critically pilloried flop Butterfly was awarded the Globe for Best New Star after her billionaire husband Meshulam Riklis flew HFPA members to Las Vegas where he plied them with food and booze at a hotel-casino he owned. And by the time Universal flew association members to New York in 1992 for an elaborate press junket for Al Pacino’s Scent of a Woman — which, perhaps not coincidentally, ended up besting such acclaimed movies as Unforgiven, The Crying Game, and A Few Good Men in the Drama, Motion Picture category the following year — the Globes’ reputation as an unserious, suspected bribe- and advertising-driven event had become received wisdom within Hollywood’s 30-mile zone.
Once the show started to be produced by Dick Clark Productions and broadcast by NBC in the ’90s, however, the Globes evolved into a reliable star chamber for major celebrities and Serious Actors alike: a fun and fizzy awards-season pit stop unfolding (with the exception of this pandemic year) in late January, just days before the end of the Oscars voting period.
Richard Rushfield, editor-in-chief of the entertainment-industry newsletter The Ankler, said that he finds the “I’m shocked, shocked to find gambling is going on in here!” tone of the publicists’ March 15 open letter more than a little disingenuous. “The idea that these publicists are suddenly horrified by what’s going on at the HFPA is pretty ridiculous,” Rushfield says. “These people know everything that’s going on. They know the [HFPA] members by name. They’re more than witness to the lack of diversity. They facilitated it.”
Highly placed sources from across the Awards Industrial Complex called the publicists the “primary aggressor” in penalizing the HFPA and ultimately pushing the Globes off the air, which most likely would not have occurred without their continuing involvement. But as these sources explain it, the groundswell of PR-maven outrage that forced the issue all the way to the network level amounts to undisguised hypocrisy — grandstanding of the highest order intended to assure celebrity clients that their reps were “taking a stand” on diversity and inclusivity even while leadership at almost all the signatory firms remains overwhelmingly white.
Rushfield feels the publicists staked out a position of rejecting the HFPA’s reforms even before any changes had been announced, pointing out their demand for the association to “swiftly manifest profound and lasting change” held the HFPA to a much higher standard than they did the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the aftermath of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy in 2015. “I don’t know the number of times that Hollywood-based publicists said to them, ‘We’re made uncomfortable by the fact that there aren’t more Black members,’” he continues, echoing a sentiment being spoken behind closed doors across Hollywood. “But I’m guessing it’s probably a number less than one.”
Recent controversies — such as eight-term HFPA president Philip Berk calling Black Lives Matter a “racist hate movement” in April and HFPA member Margaret Gardiner asking Oscar winner Daniel Kaluuya what it meant “to be directed by Regina” at the Oscars (seemingly mistaking him for One Night in Miami’s Leslie Odom Jr.) — underscored the perception that the HFPA is out of touch with contemporary cultural sensitivities. On April 20, Shaun Harper, a diversity strategist hired by the association to serve as a diversity and inclusion adviser just days after the publication of the first L.A. Times expose in March, quit the HFPA under unknown circumstances. Criticized both inside and outside the group for his seemingly arbitrary recommendation the HFPA add 13 new Black members, Harper reportedly met with representatives for Time’s Up, Color of Change, and the members of the coalition of publicists who had sent the open letter on the day he stepped down.
If the publicists’ letter suddenly held the HFPA to a new level of accountability, then Netflix’s opposition may have been the tipping point for a series of corporate boycotts. On May 6, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos sent a letter to the HFPA that was obtained by Deadline the next day. “We know that you have many well-intentioned members who want real change,” Sarandos wrote. “But Netflix and many of the talent and creators we work with cannot ignore the HFPA’s collective failure to address these crucial issues with urgency and rigor.”
Over the past two months, Netflix executives had been meeting with HFPA leadership about proposed reforms, according to a source close to the streaming service. But the executives were surprised to see the letter published — they were not informed it was going to be released to the press. In the lead up to this year’s Globes, the streaming giant outspent every other studio, heavily promoting movies and series including The Trial of the Chicago 7, Hillbilly Elegy, The Queen’s Gambit, and Emily in Paris (for which HFPA voters received a lavish set visit in 2019). According to several sources, in December of 2019, before U.S. cities had begun COVID lockdowns, HFPA members attended a “holiday toast” at Sarandos’s home in Los Angeles. “Ted had them all to his house,” one film executive tells Vulture. “He didn’t notice that none of them are Black?”
In the end, though, it was the HFPA’s announcement of reform — and the reactions to it — that pushed NBC to cancel the broadcast. Planning to increase membership by 50 percent in 18 months, the association’s board committed to adding 20 new members by August of this year, but made no specific guarantees membership will diversify enough to impact voting on the 2022 Globes. Condemnation came swiftly. Time’s Up called the changes “window-dressing platitudes” and Mark Ruffalo lamented the reforms as “discouraging,” adding on Twitter, “Honestly, as a recent winner of a Golden Globe, I cannot feel proud or happy about being a recipient of this award.”
With more foresight, the organization might have instead taken its own initiative to push pause on the event for a year and regroup, so it could then return with all the appropriate new-and-improved fanfare in 2023. “They should have been smart enough to do it themselves,” says an awards executive with knowledge of the group. “They made the 2022 Globes unfeasible.”
Of course, the very same publicity firms who made a great show of standing up to the HFPA now stand to lose an untold fortune in fees with the cancellation of next year’s Globes. To hear it from a prominent film publicist (who, like others contacted for this story, spoke on condition of anonymity due to ongoing business sensitivities) the entertainment publicity community was hardly united in the offensive to chasten and reform the HFPA. In fact, many prominent firms (including Ginsberg-Libby, DKC, and Eileen Koch Public Relations) opted not to sign the letter. And vilifying the association, they say, only compartmentalizes Hollywood’s problems of diversity and inclusion, leading to a missed opportunity for meaningful dialogue across the entire entertainment ecosystem.
“I can’t help but reflect on the many years that came before this moment when the entire industry was doing flip flops working with the HFPA to garner attention for their films, shows, directors and actors without a thought as to whether or not the organization measured up to diversity, equity and inclusion standards at the most basic level,” the film publicist says in an impassioned email to Vulture. “So rather than ‘cancel’ the HFPA and the Globes as a whole, perhaps we should offer to engage in the kind of progressive conversations that could help lift up the organization in their thinking and methods. We — the entire industry — have culpability here and we should all play a part in cleaning up the mess we’ve created.”
Sooner or later, our folks gotta snap outta this trance!! The media is our biggest enemy, that includes tv, media/social media platforms, newsprint and radio music, sports and add politicians!! These people have been fuckin with masses since the release of the radio!! And the release of the analog tv was the beginning and the digital tv allows them to do things they dream about!! Since copper color people watch the most tv outta any group, were getting slammed with the bulk of the misinformation!! Weve gotta unplug and start reading, the truth is hidden inside and between the lines in books and media is nothing but repetition and misinformation and the best indoctrination tool invented!! This corporation spends billions of dollars yearly to keep our folks in a deep sleep state, DIVIDED, confused and keep them buying into an illusion!! And the tv and these sellout movie, music and sports stars to pull the illusion off!!
i hear you and you right
but I think its a little dangerous to make a blanket statement that implies that books are the sole source of truth. Books are just another powerful wide stream medium to spread misinformation as anything else.
True, books are a part of the deception!! But the damage done by the television aka tool of deception is unbelievable!! You can start with regan and bush with the flooding of coke in our neighborhoods!! The bush gets on primetime and claim to bought it across the st from the house..Anyway, if folks cant figure out by now the tv, media and its stars are doing nothing but giving folk nothing but an illusion?? Were in trouble!!!!
HFPA Admits New Class But Falls Short of Its Black Membership Goal
The group behind the Golden Globes now has 5.7 percent Black membership, after promising to achieve 13 percent by 2022.
www.vulture.com
HFPA Admits New Class, But Stops Short of Its Black Membership Goal
By Justin Curto
Photo: Christopher Polk/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has announced the largest class of new members in the group’s history, just months after the group behind the Golden Globes faced criticism for its lack of diversity and alleged corruption. The class includes 21 new members and is being touted as the HFPA’s “most diverse” in history. Yet with six Black members, it still leaves the HFPA short of its promise to reach 13 percent Black membership by the 2022 Globes, made after the revelation that the group previously had zero Black members. “We are building a new organization, one that is not focused on fulfilling quotas, but instead has diversity and inclusion at its core, has ethical conduct as the norm, and has people of color involved in every aspect of the Association — from membership to executive leadership,” said president Helen Hoehne in a statement. (Indeed, per the release, people of color are now involved in the group’s board of directors, credentials committee, and advisory board.)
My Week In New York
A week-in-review newsletter from the people who make New York Magazine.
Among other changes, HFPA members may now reside across the U.S., rather than being required to live in Southern California, and may work in any medium, instead of only in print. Following a report that HFPA members traveled to a lavish Emily in Paris junket on Paramount Network’s dime (before the show moved to Netflix), the group has also added new ethical rules. “Members can no longer accept promotional materials or other gifts from studios, publicists, actors, directors or others associated with motion pictures and television programs,” per the release, with an additional stipulation that members pay for their own travel to events.
The new members — who bring the group to 105 members altogether, past the stated goal of 100 by 2022 — join as a few others have departed the HFPA. In April, former HFPA president Phil Berk was ousted after reports of an email in which he called Black Lives Matter a “racist hate movement.” Then, in June, two members resigned from the HFPA, calling the group “toxic” and expressing a lack of confidence in its planned reforms. Meanwhile, the fate of the 2022 Golden Globes themselves remains unclear, after NBC announced in May it would not broadcast the upcoming ceremony.
Golden Globes will hold 2022 ceremony without NBC involvement, despite ongoing Hollywood boycott
The Golden Globes will hold a 2022 ceremony without NBC's involvement, despite an ongoing boycott from prominent Hollywood figures.
Golden Globe Awards to Air on CBS in 2024
The Golden Globe Awards have found a TV home for 2024 at CBS.
variety.com
'Suits' stars Gabriel Macht and Patrick J. Adams to reunite at Golden Globes
Harvey Spector and Mike Ross are joining forces once more: 'Suits' stars Gabriel Macht and Patrick J. Adams will reunite to present at Sunday night's Golden Globe Awards.
Similar threads
