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Hollywood: The Scene That Celebrates Itself
Actor and comedian Ricky Gervais did the unthinkable Sunday night: he made an awards show interesting. As millionaire celebrities and billionaire moguls congratulated each other at the start of another tedious awards season, Gervais took a flamethrower to the house of cards.
In this room are some of the most important TV and film executives in the world. People from every background. They all have one thing in common: They’re all terrified of Ronan Farrow. He’s coming for ya. Talking of all you perverts, it was a big year for pedophile movies. Surviving R. Kelly, Leaving Neverland, Two Popes. Shut up. Shut up. I don’t care. I don’t care.
…You could binge-watch the entire first season of “Afterlife” instead of watching this show. That’s a show about a man who wants to kill himself ’cause his wife dies of cancer and it’s still more fun than this. Spoiler alert, season two is on the way so in the end he obviously didn’t kill himself. Just like Jeffrey Epstein. Shut up. I know he’s your friend but I don’t care.
…Apple roared into the TV game with “The Morning Show,” a superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing, made by a company that runs sweatshops in China. Well, you say you’re woke but the companies you work for in China — unbelievable. Apple, Amazon, Disney. If ISIS started a streaming service you’d call your agent, wouldn’t you?
So if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.
So if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent, and your God and [expletive] off, OK? It’s already three hours long.
Some in the crowd laughed, most gasped, and a few seemed genuinely upset. The online Wokerati bashed Gervais as “right-wing,” claiming he “punched down” on “marginalized” superstars. Entertainment reporters feigned disgust, wanting to protect access to that sweet Oscars swag.
Hollywood is founded on ridiculing corporations, suburbs, the religious, flyover country, conservatives, et al., but tell a few jokes at their expense? That just isn’t done.
Quite like the news media, another industry eager to give each other awards for bashing everyone in sight yet remarkably thin-skinned to the slightest criticism sent their way.
Both remind me of a loose musical genre in the early ’90s derided as “The Scene That Celebrates Itself.” This group of bands from London to Oxford played similar music, cheered each others’ gigs, and often shared band members. The UK’s music press treated this good-natured collaboration with contempt; bands are supposed to feud with each other. That’s what sells magazines.
Today, the entertainment world and mainstream journalism are scenes that exist primarily to celebrate themselves and the hell with everyone else. They are as prone to hypocrisy as any other industry but are appalled at anyone daring to point it out.
Laugh at yourselves, Hollywood. Ricky and the rest of us surely are.
Published in Entertainment
Have been saying, that was Lenny Bruce subversive. The correct people are laughing, and the correct people are upset.
Like I said last night, the last time I can remember someone going into an event put on by liberals for liberals and trashing their most deeply held feelings about their most famous people was back in the 1996 election year, when Don Imus was the guest speaker at the White House Correspondents Dinner and destroyed Bill Clinton. And the morning-after reaction then, in the nascent days of the Internet, was pretty much the same from the arbiters of pop culture — shock and a Greta Thunberg-like “How Dare You!” reaction. The D.C.-New York media had loved Imus’ move towards more political talk over the previous 5-6 years, they were just shocked he used his acerbic wit against their leader. Imus was still a big name on the political book selling circuit until his run-in later with the Rutgers women’s basketball team, but his star kind if plateaued at that moment, since the hyper-partisan types realized he wasn’t one of them.
With Gervias, it was his atheism and past progressive positions that got him onto the Golden Globes stage in the first place. He’s been snarky and biting in his previous hosting turns, but never at the level he was Sunday night. Whether or not it’s going to make any difference, other than to have future award shows vet their hosts more closely to make sure their don’t speak Truth to Celebrity Power is open to question — Michelle Williams and Patricia Arquette simply bulled through with their progressive harangues Sunday night while accepting awards after Gervais’ speech, and the usual progressive types celebrated Williams shouting her abortion to the world. So the monologue had zero effect on their monomania about progressive causes, and in a year when Trump’s running for re-election, it’s hard to see the other awards shows getting their celebs to shut up about politics.
Bravo Mr. Gabriel!
This would be an unforgettable topic for you and Mr. Miller. Anyway to bring him back….for old time’s sake? {nod to Godfather I}.
That’s gonna leave a mark.
And then there was his line later in the show:
“Our next presenter starred in Netflix’s Bird Box, a movie where people survive by acting like they don’t see a thing – sort of like working for Harvey Weinstein.”
And then when people gasped, he added “You did it! I didn’t – you did it!”
Ouch.
It was just what these people needed to hear.
What makes Ricky Gervais so fascinating, is that he is making fun of Hollywood with their own values. He is insulting Hollywood for living their woke values. He would a boring scold if he made fun of them from a right-wing Christian perspective. But he cuts so deep because he is holding a mirror to their own professed beliefs. Let’s take his insults.
You talk about protecting the rights of women ceaselessly and you are a bunch of greedy people who will befriend the rapiest guy ever in order to get ahead.
You will bitch endlessly about protecting poor folks and minorities but when you can make money from the most oppressive government in the world (excluding North Korea) you will whore yourself out immediately and without reservation.
This, and it’s very much the same as having the woke players and coaches in the NBA exposed back in October for their hypocrisy on the China issue. No comedian did the deed there, but the public also saw that the SJW beliefs were merely situational, and that when it was their own careers and bank accounts that could benefit, they abandoned what they had been telling the American public they truly cared about.
What do you actually believe in when you will immediately sell out for China? So Georgia having trans-people use one particular bathroom is such a huge deal that you have to cancel some games. China: ripping out the organs of religious minorities, beating up Hong Kong people protesting for basic freedoms in a matter not dissimilar to the Civil Rights movement and throwing Uighurs into camps don’t matter.
So if you all the human rights stuff doesn’t matter when you want to make money, why should I trust you when you talk about anything else?
I have only one gripe: Gervais has been doing this for 5 years. Maybe he was a little bit more over the top this time. But he’s been trashing them at the Golden Globes for a while.
I got the sense that he was saying this is my last year doing it, so I might as well go out in a blaze of glory.
Social Justice Warriorism as performance art. The NBA has been the Golden Child league of the media for years, and the praise was even more effusive in recent years due to the players and coaches going woke (ESPN’s woke former president John Skipper was even using his channel to try and scuttle the NFL’s image, as part of his idea that pro basketball would be the No. 1 sport in America in the 2020s, and ESPN wouldn’t need to kowtow to the NFL any longer. They went wall-to-wall NBA, including in 2016-17 covering summer league games more than their own MLB games they had rights to, and the political messaging of players like LeBron, Steph Curry and coaches like Steve Kerr and Greg Popovich were part of the celebration).
That act already was turning off fans before the China kerfuffle, and even the post-Skipper ESPN had cooled their woke jets the past two years. The NBA misread the signs and paid the price.
If whichever network is televising the Oscars wants to guarantee the best ratings EVER they do know whom to beg to host….and it’s NOT Billy Crystal!
The main difference between that and what he said before was the “this is my last year”. His whole deal was “I don’t care what you think…I’m saying whatever I want!”
Yeah, that’s what I mean. He kept saying “I don’t care” and “fifth year” . . . sounded to me like he figured he might as well stick it to everyone on the way out.
I am loving the turn of phrase “but the public also saw that the SJW beliefs were merely situational,” as it sums up the game in a nutshell.
The fact that their creed is situational is exactly why the Lefties have resorted to kneecapping the critics. Should they instead engage the critic in an argument founded on logic, or rhetoric or even poetics, they might not win, due to how easy it is to show they don’t really mean most of the platforms of their politics. (And when they do win, it is often due to lying through their teeth.) It also became apparent to the Leftist crowd that while the argument is underway, the critic’s criticism is broadcast and emphasized.
So it is so much better to simply kneecap the critic by saying “Your thinking is sexist, or racist,” or sinking lower than the later, they say “You are a White Supremacist.”
The only problem is that sooner or later, the critics are on to their game and they upend it. Candace Owens has done this, with grace and intelligence; now Gervais is amping up the comic Truth Bombs he has been testing out over the past years. His Truth Bombs have become a lightning hot scorch torching the whitened sepulchers of the Leftist crowd.
Sunday night, the Golden Globes host reached critical mass – it is like the remark at the McCarthy hearings, “Have you no shame?” suddenly was reborn as Comedy Gold. Those who have rejected the Left thank you, Mr Gervais.
I had no idea what this program was on the TV at my health club when I started my bike routine. The sound wasn’t on and there wasn’t captions, and I don’t do headphones for this. But as he continued silently droning on, I thought it was an odd podium if he were a master of ceremonies for an awards show. He was at a table like you might expect in a bar and there was a tall glass mostly filled with what looked like beer or ale. I first thought he was doing comedy (they did flash the well dressed audience). If as you say he was delivering a message some in the audience might be uncomfortable with, visually, I think it’s a genius of a way to set the stage to put the audience at ease.
Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit has been using the line, “I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis,” for over a decade now, and with the Hollywood left, the most glaring example of their woke hypocrisy has been their continued shrieking about climate change and praising people like Greta Thunberg while they continue to hop around the globe on private jets.
Their SJW beliefs there are totally situational, and extend only so far as it doesn’t inconvenience their lifestyles. Aside from Gervais laying the Hollywood double-standards to waste Sunday night, it was also noted by several sites that when Joaquin Phoenix went up to the podium to accept his Golden Globe Award for “The Joker” he began talking about that specific situation and started telling the audience they needed to stop flying private jets. The music started up at that moment to drown him out — Phoenix is all good with the climate change talking points and doesn’t think it’s a fraud, but he wanted his fellow actors and actresses to stop being frauds about taking it seriously, and unlike Williams or Arquette, he wasn’t allowed to finish his speech because it would have just added to the comedy knee to the groin Gervais had delivered.
“Punched down” and “marginalized” media superstars? The online Wokerati couldn’t really be serious. The superstars with millions of Twitter and Instagram followers, access to almost any microphone or media camera they want? They are “marginalized”? You can “punch down” on them? Ha. These folk really appear not to know which direction is up and which is down.
A year ago these same superstars eagerly used their elevated platforms and millions of Twitter followers to bash an anonymous high school student from Kentucky. That is “punching down.”
Anybody who doesn’t realize that media superstars sit on the most elevated platform possible is even more out of touch with reality than Mr. Gervais said they were.
I’m not being clear. His previous performances included the “I don’t care what you think, so what if they don’t invite me back, they are all stupid.”
All I’m really saying? His performance this year was great. His previous performances were great, too. Go watch ’em!
Kinda looks like he sat on a corncob. Yes, I readily acknowledge that Tom Hanks is a great talent and has produced/acted in many wonderfully memorable movies. He deserved the award he won Sunday night. He just might be lacking some in self-deprecating humor.
The #1 priority for any institution is to safeguard the continued existence of that institution.
Hollywood is not unique in this regard. The only difference is that Hollywood’s self-promotion efforts are more noticeable because, well, mass communications is what Hollywood does.
My favorite line was telling them ‘they know nothing about the real world, s0 spare us your political speeches’ – I hope they got that part if nothing else. Oh…..and that the endless comic book movies are not real cinema……Go Ricky!
Jon,
The pompous absurdity of Hollywood is astounding. Not only does it make these awards ceremonies incredibly tedious but the films themselves are slowly being degraded. Either you do a ‘comic book’ movie or you beat the audience over the head with woke nonsense.
Strangely, Hollywood should welcome Gervais and invite him back next year at all costs. He is the breath of fresh air that they desperately need. Don’t hold your breath.
Regards,
Jim
How do you punch down at the rich and famous?
In their minds, they’re part of #TheResistance, and therefore are part of the oppressed masses. How can they be privileged if people are ignoring their progressive ideas?
Didn’t Truman Capote once claim that the best actors/actresses are people who are not too bright? The better the actor/actress the lower their intelligence. I think he was specifically referring to Lawrence Olivier who he said was a very decent person and great actor, but who was rather dumb.
That is a decent observation. However Capote relied on someone holding forth with brilliant conversations, as a means to ascertain their brilliance, and some great actors are painfully shy. So it might be hard to know if Olivier was truly dumb or just very shy.
He said that?
That is epic.