Something unusual happened last night at the Golden Globes 2018. To raise their voices among the spectacle transmitted around the world, celebrities and other people from the industry wore black to support all the victims that have been sexually harassed not only in Hollywood but around the world. That was then followed by Natalie Portman’s critic and Oprah Winfrey’s speech.
This is the first major award ceremony that’s celebrated after the several women that claimed last year being sexually assaulted by the American mogul and film producer Harvey Weinstein – which, then, led to a wave of people inside and outside the industry denouncing similar stories.
Following the Time’s Up and #MeToo movements, not only women decided to wear black gowns, as men dressed black shirts and tuxedos of the same color. They all also wore Time’s Up pins and brought to the ceremony people known for their significant fights against sexual harassment and in favor of a society where both men and women’s right are respected equally.
Amazon’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” actress, Elisabeth Moss, won the Best Actress award at the Los Angeles event. At her speech, she recalled the “women who were brave enough to fight for equality and freedom in this world.” However, the 35-year-old American woman was criticised because of her association with the Church of Scientology, accused of covering up sexual assaults for some time.
This ceremony also showed the first African-American woman who gets the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award: 63-year-old actress and media mogul, Oprah Winfrey. It was given by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association due to how much she’s contributed to the industry, and handed by the American actress Reese Witherspoon – who’s claimed having been sexually assaulted by Weinstein while she was under the legal age.
“It is not lost on me that, at this moment, there is some little girl watching as I become the first Black woman to be given the same award,” Winfrey said in the speech. “It is an honor and it is a privilege to share the evening with all of them.”
She then enforced women, victims of sexual harassment, to open up with their stories and to look for help.
The “all men nominees”
Natalie Portman has also been largely named after a very-subtle critic she gave last night. After Ron Howard gave her the floor, she proceeded to call the “all men nominees” for Best Director – won by The Shape of Water’s Guillermo del Toro.
Lady Bird, directed by the American actress, producer, and filmmaker Greta Gerwig, was among the most-recalled movies of the night. The team who made it collected four different awards – best motion picture (musical or comedy) among them. However, Gerwig did not receive a nomination for Best Director.
“I think that it’s inevitable that those stories won’t get told if you don’t have female creators,” Gerwig told CNN earlier this year of her film. “But I do think that it’s important to tell these stories because on a very basic level, as Virginia Woolf said, ‘Men don’t know what women do when they’re not there.’ So we need to tell the stories of what we’re doing when they’re not there. Otherwise, they will go completely undocumented.”
Only seven movies directed by women have been nominated at the Golden Globes since the ceremony started in 1944.
Source: CNN