Turning the Globes
Would a More Colorful Hollywood Foreign Press Association Change Anything?
The celebrities showed up. The media is still talking about the outfits , the wins and the Zoom speeches. “Winner of a Golden Globe” is being put on posters, IMDB and bios. A smattering of favorites won big. Now it’s all over, and in all likelihood the momentary scrutiny of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) that was the undercurrent of the 2021 Golden Globes Awards celebration won’t bring many changes before we start having the same conversation next year.
Why do the Golden Globes always get a pass? Well, partly because when it’s not awards season. nobody really cares about the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. And truth be told that’s probably as it should be.
In the mid 1990’s when I was the publisher of a small cultural magazine and wrote about film much more than I have recently, I was part of a group of Washington DC critics who spent many early afternoons sitting in cushy seats at the Motion Picture Association headquarters watching screenings of Hollywood’s latest offerings.
It was a small, ragtag group of film nerds — Black, white, Asian, big media, local TV, public radio, indie and community papers. It was too soon for bloggers. But even among that strange crew, there were a couple of people who seemed even stranger. A short, older gentleman of vague eastern European extraction who wore shiny suits and a tragic toupee, and his wife, a thick-accented older blonde woman at least a foot taller than her partner, and fond of short skirts, blue eye makeup and red lipstick. The rest of us called them “Boris and Natasha” out of earshot — but with affection. They were a sight to behold, but friendly and kind.
I never saw them take notes during screenings. Nor did I ever see their reviews, mostly because they both wrote for small community-based newspapers in whatever far away city they represented. They were, however, especially visible and animated when the occasional movie star or director showed up to discuss their films.
It wasn’t until a few years later when I stumbled onto the Golden Globes telecast) and saw them on the screen that I discovered Boris and Natasha were in fact high-ranking members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the group that gives those awards.
In that moment, the =years of criticism of the HFPA all made sense.
That the HFPA is largely made up relative unknown writers who work for relatively unknown publications that may or may not have readerships. Their voting patterns tend to correlate to the accessibility of those who are nominated at parties and junkets, a running joke in Hollywood for years. And when Ricky Gervais began hosting, that fact even became an underlying theme on its own telecast.
Yet because the Globes’ category and awards selections often detour from the staid and predictable Oscar and Emmy standards, the foibles, follies and faults of the HFPA have largely been given a pass, even though major media organizations have penned articles uncovering the group’s opaque insularity and incredible weirdness for decades.
This year’s criticism of the HFPA for its lack of diversity is simply more of the same but with a racial twist. Still, the call for racial diversity within the ranks of the HFPA is an appropriate argument to have, but the reasoning seems shallow and self-serving.
To the extent that entertainment awards convey the perception of quality and impacts who gets to tell stories, who wants to see them and how creators are valued, then there is merit and purpose to a call for the HFPA to bring on black members. And there is the obvious greater importance of foreign viewers particularly as streaming dominates the landscape.
That said, what are the HFPA’s critics really asking of the organization? That the organization adjust and clarify its rules for admission? That it actively seek out and broaden its scope to include Black film journalists from South America, the Caribbean and Africa, as well as Afro-Europeans who work in the United States? That Black American film critics submit more of their work to foreign publications so they can qualify for entry?
Each of those things would be good solutions, perhaps. But those solutions also assume that any journalist with credibility has a strong desire to be part of the clown show that is the HFPA.
The requirements to be an HFPA member lack full transparency, but on a very basic level it does require one to have published a minimum amount of four times per year in foreign publications.
So if that indeed is the dividing line, ultimately the issue points out the incredible of lack of diversity in minority representation that also permeates media organizations in the largely European countries from which the bulk of the current HFPA members hail –Germany, the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Poland and the multisyllabic Eastern European nations.
But getting more color into overwhelmingly white newsrooms in countries that marginalize its Black citizens, native born and immigrant alike is an ongoing struggle, particularly in places such as France, for example, where counting employees by race is illegal, in favor of an illusionary notion of “One France”. But the fight needs to happen, and that is but one of the many important agendas of Black Lives Matter movements around the globe that have taken inspiration from the death of George Floyd.
But should it happen so more black critics can vote for the Golden Globes? Or for the broader benefit of the people of color in those nations who need their own stories told on an everyday basis?
If indeed a stronger embrace of black film by global critics means more stories get to inspire people around the world to battle injustice, then that needs to be the argument. But until then, it would be much more preferable that the world of Hollywood embrace the critics of color in the US and around the world who are doing strong, legitimate work analyzing cinema, at least until the HFPA changes its ways.
