[music]
Female Speaker 1: Weeping may come in the evening but joy comes in the morning. We embarked on this journey together. With love, we mourned, we loved, we healed. More than 30 years later, two guys thought of me. They remembered that kid.
Male Speaker 1: I said what you said, I touched nothing.
Female Speaker 1: They gave me an opportunity to try again.
Male Speaker 2: I cannot go to the only award show that will ever nominate me for anything.
Female Speaker 2: Comedy is so important to me. Comedy brings people together, comedy gives us all the same laugh. Hey, Brett Pick.
Melissa Harris-Perry: It's The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry and even in the pouring rain, the Golden Globes made their return last night.
Jerrod Carmichael: Welcome to the 80th Annual Golden Globe Awards. [applause] I am your host Jerrod Carmichael. [applause] Sure, and I'll tell you why I'm here. I'm here because I'm Black.
[laughter]
Melissa Harris-Perry: Joining me now to talk about what happened last night at the Golden Globes is Rafer Guzman, film critic for Newsday and co-host of Movie Therapy with Rafer and Kristen. Rafer, welcome back to The Takeaway.
Rafer Guzman: Thanks for having me. Hi Melissa.
Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, give me a top moment for you from last night.
Rafer Guzman: Boy, the top moment for me after everything that's been happening with the Golden Globes and all these questions about was the show going to go on and do they still matter and are people going to show up, for me, it was when Mike White got up and accepted the award for the White Lotus. I think it was for best limited series. He said something like I was going to do this speech in Italian.
Mike White: I'm too drunk because there was no food. When we got there they were like the food is over.
Rafer Guzman: I thought, oh, the Globes are back. Everyone's drunk, everyone's having a good time. We didn't think they could pull it off, but they did. It's a pretty good success story for the Golden Globes.
Melissa Harris-Perry: When you say everything that's been going on with them, remind folks of what has been going on with the Hollywood Foreign Press and the Golden Globes?
Rafer Guzman: Nutshell version, so it was the LA Times. I think it was 2021, they do this big expose, and the Times has been doing these kinds of things. Every few years they do an expose on the Golden Globes, but this one really stuck. I think what really stuck this time was that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which hands out the Globes, had no Black members at all.
There were other things about inflated salaries and things like that, but it was the fact that they had no Black members that I think really led people to feel this sense of outrage. Tom Cruise gave back his three Golden Globes, and the NBC dropped the show for 2022. The HFPA promises to make meaningful reform as they say.
Todd Boehly, the billionaire, purchases the group. Used to be a non-profit group, now it's a for-profit company. He promises to run it like one. NBC puts the Globes back on for this year on a Tuesday, weirdly. It's usually on a Sunday, but they came back, and last night was I think their big comeback story.
Melissa Harris-Perry: On the one hand, if you're Hollywood Foreign Press, maybe if you just love all things Hollywood, that is all good. I'm wondering if, at least in what you saw last night, there was anything that does seem like that meaningful change that was promised.
Rafer Guzman: Well, I think you did see a handful of awards that spoke well of diversity. I think you had people like Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan who won acting awards for everything everywhere all at once. Was a big success story from last year. You had Angela Bassett winning best supporting actress. A side note to that, she becomes the first major actor-- I guess I would say, she becomes the first individual to win a major acting award for a Marvel movie. She won for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
This is seen as a moment of progress for the superhero films that usually get brushed aside at the awards shows. You did have some awards that went to people of color, and I think that's a good thing for the Globes. They took a hit, I think, because they didn't have any female directors nominated this year in a year that was a pretty strong one for female directors. They moved forward and I think they made a few strides here and there.
Melissa Harris-Perry: There were a few other great moments. Now, I am an avid elementary fanatic. I think all of team Takeaway officially is, and it was kind of a big night for Abbott last night.
Rafer Guzman: Yes, and that was good to see. That series has been a real success story too. Interesting workplace comedy in the public schools is one of those things where you think, "Gee, why didn't anyone think of that before?" Yes, I was glad to see that did well. I was glad to see that White Lotus did well. I'm a big Mike White fan. Yes, that was great for Abbott.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Then Eddie Murphy, receiving a lifetime achievement award. Talk to me about that.
Rafer Guzman: Sort of an odd moment. They bring Tracy Morgan up to introduce him, and that makes sense. As he said, both Black comedians from Brooklyn and both were on Saturday Night Live and Tracy Morgan was very, very deferential to Eddie Murphy. Then they bring on Jamie Lee Curtis who I think probably many people had forgotten. I certainly laughed until she said it out loud that she was with him in Trading Places. That's going back a long ways.
Melissa Harris-Perry: That is going way back.
Rafer Guzman: Way, way back. I'd completely forgotten about it until she said it. I thought, "Oh, right, that's why she's there." Then Eddie Murphy makes this very short speech, thanking the usual movie producers, his manager, his agent. He cracks one Will Smith joke that seemed a little bit out of date at this point, and that was it, and then he was off. That was the end of this lifetime achievement award. I don't know really what to make of that, but there it went.
Eddie Murphy: Turn the heat up.
[laughter]
Eddie Murphy: Back there it's nice and warm but over here, ooh, it's cold as hell and freezing.
Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, Rafer. Take a quick break with me. More Golden Globes on the other side of this. We're back with Rafer Guzman, film critic for Newsday, and we're talking about the Golden Globes. I want to ask you about a moment that wasn't a movie or a TV moment. In the midst of all these awards Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, got to address the audience, and he did not get played off for a short time.
Rafer Guzman: No, no. Yes, he was introduced by Hollywood's go-to internationalist and activist, Sean Penn. It was remarkable as the Golden Globes was stretching on and people were up there tipsy and making jokes and their speeches were running over and the pianist is trying to play people off and they're refusing to go, yet we still managed to find time for Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
I think what it really spoke to was how incredibly adept he's been at getting his message out through social media and popular culture. He took a break from a war to record something for the Golden Globes of the United States. It's pretty remarkable and that was a remarkable moment. He did use a cinematic metaphor he said--
Volodymyr Zelenskyy: "There will be no III World War. It is not a trilogy."
Rafer Guzman: I thought that was this little nod to Hollywood, which I thought was clever.
Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to go back for a second here to Michelle Yeoh, and the big win for Everything Everywhere All at Once, because she too refused to be played off stage.
Rafer Guzman: Yes, she actually told the pianist to shut up.
Michelle Yeoh: Then along came the best gift, Everything Everywhere All at Once. Shut up, please.
[laughter]
Michelle Yeoh: I can beat you up, okay? And that's serious.
Rafer Guzman: That was a great moment for her. She talked about being an immigrant. I think she said something like coming to Hollywood was a dream come true until I got here. I think a lot of people in the audience laughed because I think they knew what she was talking about. We'd just seen Ke Huy Quan, who also won for the same movie. He's the guy who played Short Round in Indiana Jones. What was that? Almost 40 years ago, and really hasn't worked very much since. He was very open about that, being a minority in Hollywood and not being able to get that much work. Those were two, I thought, very moving moments for the Globes.
Melissa Harris-Perry: I also just stand her. I find her amazing. That was definitely a top moment for me. Rafer Guzman is film critic for Newsday and co-host of Movie Therapy with Rafer and Kristen. Rafer, thanks as always for joining us.
Rafer Guzman: Thank you, Melissa.
[music]
Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.
New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.
