Usually noted for their red carpet flair, this year’s Golden Globe Awards took a much more serious turn with Meryl Streep letting Donald Trump know exactly what she thought of his behaviour during the country’s presidential campaign.
Much revered for her work on screen, Meryl Streep was honoured with the Cecil B DeMille Award, given for outstanding contributions in the world of entertainment. The Hollywood legend used her speech to highlight what she thought was the appalling behaviour of the now President-elect when he mocked a disabled reporter. Speaking of the incident, without naming Mr Trump by name, Ms Streep said, “It kind of broke my heart when I saw it,” she said.
“I still can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life.
“It was the moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back.
“This instinct to humiliate, when it’s modelled by someone … powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life.
“Because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.”
Ms Streep then pointed to Hollywood’s multicultural heritage as a direct contrast to Mr Trump’s policy on immigration. “Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners and if you kick them all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts,” she said.
Mr Trump responded in the best way he knows how – via Twitter – saying in a series of three tweets, “Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes. She is a Hillary flunky who lost big. For the 100th time, I never “mocked” a disabled reporter (would never do that) but simply showed him “grovelling” when he totally changed a 16-year-old story that he had written in order to make me look bad. Just more very dishonest media!”
Of course, Meryl Streep wasn’t the only one to take aim at President-elect Donald Trump, with Host Jimmy Fallon kicking off proceedings by saying that the Golden Globes was “one of the few places left where America still honours the popular vote”.
And Hugh Laurie, who accepted the award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Night Manager, cast doubt on the future of the award’s ceremony, “I don’t mean to be gloomy, but it has the words ‘Hollywood’, ‘foreign’ and ‘press’ in the title,” Laurie said. In a final dig, he accepted his award “on behalf of psychopathic billionaires everywhere”.
Read more at ABC.net.au
Watch Meryl’s speech below
