Esteemed actor Meryl Streep accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 2017 Golden Globes, Sunday night (Jan. 8). Through throaty whispers, due to voice loss and emotional exhaustion, she talked immigration and challenging the status quo, before putting president-elect Donald Trump on blast for his “performance” of the year.
“Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners,” Streep reckoned in front of an attentive audience of Who’s Who, “and if you kick us all out, you’ll have nothing to watch except for football and mixed martial arts, which are not arts.”
She went on to reference a bevy of fellow actors, calling their names and hometowns, so as to drive home the message of Hollywood being the proverbial melting pot of varied folks from different walks of life. Before she would exit stage left, the New Jersey native took aim at Trump for publicly mocking The New York Times’ Serge Kovaleski, a disabled reporter.
“There was nothing good about it, but it did its job,” she said. “It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out my head because it wasn’t in a movie; it was in real life. That instinct to humiliate when it’s modeled by someone in a public platform, it filters down into everyone’s life because it gives permission for others to do the same.”
The Iron Lady left us with a quote from her late friend Carrie Fisher, and a word to the wise that challenged today’s journalists to “safeguard the truth” above all.
