The Hollywood Foreign Press Association agreed to reforms due to criticism and boycotts.
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which annually presents the Golden Globe Awards, the second most prestigious after the Oscars, is in a dire crisis. She is criticized by the American media and representatives of the film industry.
Actor Tom Cruise returned three of his Golden Globes to the association, and NBC, which had broadcast the awards nationwide since 1964, refused to broadcast. Correspondent.net tells the details.
Doesn’t fit the new ethics
At the end of winter this year, the Los Angeles Times published a large-scale investigation into the problems of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a non-profit organization of journalists and photographers who inform the public about events in the entertainment industry.
It turned out that all 87 members of the association are white, which does not meet the new norms of inclusiveness and global ethics.
Journalists believe that such a situation may have an impact on the nominations. So, in 2021, the Golden Globe jury did not nominate films with blacks in the lead roles for the main award, namely: Judas and the Black Messiah, Ma Rainey: Mother of the Blues and Five of the Same Blood.
Because of this, NBC decided to stop broadcasting the Golden Globes in 2022. The management promised to return the broadcast in a year, “if the organization fulfills its plan” to expand the jury.
Hollywood actor Tom Cruise turned down his Golden Globe awards for the same reason.
Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos has sent a letter to the association’s executives to end the partnership until they take real action and present a clear roadmap for change. It is worth recalling that Netflix projects in 2021 were nominated 42 times and received six awards.
Following Netflix, Amazon expressed a similar position.
The key steps that film companies and Hollywood stars are calling for have been set for July by the association. The selection process for new members will be launched in the second half of the month, and they are due to be admitted on 2 August.
On the same day, the board of directors will be updated. All members of the council, headed by the CEO, will resign, and new persons will be elected to leadership positions.
Note that in April, their organization was released by producer Philip Burke, who served as president of the association, due to accusations of harassment against actor Brendan Fraser, known for the film The Mummy.
Burke also said that the Black Lives Matter protest movement was racist and called its co-founder “a self-proclaimed Marxist scholar.”
In addition, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is riddled with corruption, according to the Los Angeles Times. The newspaper noted that Emily’s series in Paris received two Golden Globe nominations in 2021, despite a cold reception from critics and viewers.
The newspaper writes that in 2020, Paramount TV, which commissioned the production of the show, hosted an expensive reception in France for members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
LAT reports that the journalists stayed in a hotel with rooms that cost from 1,400 dollars a night and dined at the private restaurant Musee des Arts Forains.
This episode is just one of the others – according to the publication, because of the “friendship” with film studios and distributors, the association could unfairly nominate films and television series for the Golden Globe.
The authors of the investigation also believe that the members of the association receive too much as a non-profit organization that does not pay taxes.
For the current fiscal year, the organization paid its members $ 2.15 million. In January alone, 20 of them received almost 3.5 thousand dollars “for watching foreign films,” the newspaper writes with reference to the organization’s monthly report.
The organization pays for the members of the board of directors – it is known that five of them received from 63 to almost 134 thousand dollars in the tax year that ended June 30, 2019. According to experts interviewed by the publication, these amounts look “unusual”.
It has long been known about corruption among the presenters of the Golden Globe. Back in 1968, NBC pulled out of airing the award when the FCC found the ceremony “materially misleading the public as to how the winners were selected and by what procedures.”
Then the organization reformed and made the procedures transparent, but a few years later the mediocre actress Pia Zadora received the Golden Globe for her role in the criticized film Butterfly. It turned out that her husband had taken the jury to his casino in Las Vegas the day before.
And in recent years, the Golden Globes have been accused of discriminating against Asian films due to the fact that the contestants – Parasites, Farewells and Minari – were nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, not Best Film, although Minari, for example, was made entirely of American team.
The Golden Globe reacted to the next boycott with a promise to accept 20 new members by August, lift the moratorium on voting among new members during the first year, approve a new Code of Conduct agreed with PR specialists and studios, and form an advisory council to comply with the implementation of reforms.
Also, the organizers of the Golden Globe promised to support internship programs for students from underrepresented segments of the population.
Tina Chen, head of charitable organization Time’s Up, believes this is “a defining moment for Hollywood.”
“Today we have the opportunity to recognize that by acting as a united front against one of the strongest but deeply flawed reward systems, we can start a rethinking of the situation of an entire industry.” Chen said.
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