How Virtue Signaling is Causing the Demise of Art.
The 2021 Golden Globe Awards had a 68% drop in audience ratings from the previous year. No, there’s not a misplaced decimal in that number. That’s sixty-eight, a truly staggering decline in interest of one of the most popular annual award shows. A drop in 10% of the audience would’ve been significant, but a decline of nearly 70% is a virtual free fall; an actual ratings catastrophe. The show was hosted by Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, two of the most skilled and talented mega-stars in Hollywood. Anyone would be hard-pressed to find more adept and likable people to host a virtual award show, and the evening was still filled with major Hollywood A-listers even if they were, like Gillian Anderson said, “sitting alone in a hotel room in Prague.” So this begs the question: why did this show have worse reviews than “Gigli”? Well, to be fair, it didn’t help that the entire show was going to be held on Zoom. Humans are tired of screens, whether we know it or not. This didn’t make people clamor to their televisions to watch a pieced together Zoom disaster, but I suspect there was a bigger problem at hand. Audiences sensed intuitively, and correctly, that the Golden Globes were going to be a woke, virtue signaling nightmare, so 68% of viewers tuned out.
This period in history will go down as one of the darkest periods in human civilization. Not only is there a raging pandemic that has taken the lives of over (at the time of writing this) 520,000 Americans, we are also in a period of civil unrest, economic despair, racial disparity, the brink of civil war and, to top it all off, we got a lot of snow. To quote Donna Summer, “Enough is enough.” The Golden Globes had a beautiful window of opportunity to put on a transcendent, imaginative production; one filled with comedy, joy, optimism and hope. This is true because 1) we could have used an escape from life in 2021 and 2) Americans have literally done nothing but watch television for the past calendar year. In fact, TV and film were all we had. Was this not the perfect year to celebrate the achievements in those mediums? It’d like being on a sinking ship and not taking a moment to thank your life raft. But the telecast was a pandering evening filled with less humor than “The English Patient,” despite the immeasurable talents of Fey and Poehler, and speeches from people’s houses. There were cringe worthy sketches that paired celebrities with actual doctors while Mark Ruffalo, an actor and activist worth $35 million, told the audience from his mansion, “we’re all in this together”. It should be noted that when Tina Fey and Amy Poehler can’t make something funny, you’ve got a problem. I suspect they were constrained by the producers and not allowed to do any of their own material, all of which would have been stronger. Instead we got three hours of, “We must stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. Because trans women.” The Globes were so focused on checking all of the boxes of political messages and virtue signaling to satisfy the Twitter mob that they forgot they actually had to entertain the audience.
A recent press release showed that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the committee that votes on the Golden Globes, has zero black members out of 87. That’s right. There were more black people in The Brady Bunch than there are in the HFPA. This is utterly preposterous and, frankly, hard to reconcile, but I’m waiting to discuss it in my next think piece “Unsolicited Ideas About Race from a White Guy.” There was clearly well-founded outrage about this leading up to the day of the telecast. Hollywood has had a major come-to-Jesus moment with its race problems and, to be fair, we did see diversity on the stage, at least with regard to race and gender. The Golden Globes clearly felt an unprecedented pressure to present themselves as not racist and the effects of that were evident in the telecast. The two white hosts came out and called out the HFPA for not having any black members but…so what? It looks good on paper, but does any of this afford actual change? The HFPA should be on the stage addressing this, notthe hosts. It’s like hitting someone’s car and then sending your four year old over to apologize—and 7 pm on the evening of the telecast is a little late to address the issue. The Hollywood Foreign Press made every attempt in their last minute, frantic attempts to cover up their complete lack of diversity and in doing so forgot the most important part: the show itself.
Now before everyone gets upset, I get it. Doing this event remotely and with no one in the audience had to have been a logistical nightmare on all accounts, and the fact that it even happened is probably a true testament to the technical crew working the Golden Globes. But, are you telling me this was really the best thing we could come up with a year into this? This looked like what the award show could have been if we did it one week into Covid. Alas, 365 days later no one could seem to find a way to make this event happen in a more creative way. Also, for the past four years, award shows have been recognizable largely by anti-Trump tirades with stars lecturing the audience both in person and from their gazebos about how the country needed to “vote with your heart” and “lead with love”. Two months into the Biden presidency with the Democrats controlling the senate, there wasn’t really that much to complain about besides the apocalyptic state of the world. And guess what? The show was boring as hell. Anti-Trump rhetoric wasn’t able to be used as a substitute for actual entertainment and Hollywood was now forced to come up with an actual product.
My nonagenarian Grandma Harriet (God love her) is alive and well, and has spent her entire life as an avid theatre goer. Growing up in the New York area, she was fortunate enough to see Broadway shows, like the original Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, including Oklahoma and South Pacific. She unfortunately didn’t see the original production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852—she was out of town. But I vividly remember her once telling me that it was great to go see a Broadway show during World War II because she could “forget about the war for a few hours.” This idea has stuck with me for my entire life; that theatre could be a form of escapism from the everyday world, especially during a time of great catastrophe. And this is where the Golden Globes, and much of the entertainment industry in general, have failed us so acutely. It didn’t allow us the opportunity to escape. The Golden Globes were an exposé of all our current social and political issues. Americans were asked to sit like Alex from “A Clockwork Orange” and listen to every moment of horror from the past year relived. They knew that this was going to leave them as empty as they have felt during this entire bleak experience which is why most of them watched episodes of “Mama June: From Not to Hot” instead of tuning in. Art has to be an escape, not a prison.
We’ve been careening down this path long before Covid hit. Hollywood and Broadway have gotten extraordinarily lazy, with reboots and sequels dominating the movies and screen-to-stage musicals, or star-studded revivals taking over the entire purportedly creative theatre scene. With the shutdown of all live performances we’ve proven to ourselves that the moment the status-quo dissolves, we are not the creative people we’ve claimed to be all along. It’s all a fraud. Being artificially woke is the low hanging fruit du jour, and it’s what everyone thinks they have to artificially embody to be relevant. Well, here’s a hard to swallow pill: it’s complete inaction and entirely undermines the relevance you crave above all else. The least creative way to confront a problem is to talk about it, especially in the droll, pathetic ways we’ve been trying to. We need to let art itself fight the fights, prove the points, and incite people to think; we need to let art itself provide the escape. This is why we write. This is why we perform. This is why we create. We are artists. We can get through the pandemic without a musical set in the Cedar Sinai coronavirus ward. Let art do its job. More dance, less woke. As Mark Ruffalo once said, “We’re all in this together.”
