The 71st Annual Golden Globe Awards were broadcast live Sunday night, offering much of the same glamour, banter and self-congratulatory speeches we love/hate. Indeed, if there’s one thing Oscar night’s trashy, booze-filled counterpart has going for it, it’s consistency. The Golden Globes ceremony has been held in the same room at the Beverly Hilton Hotel for the past 53 years, and the show itself has seen little changes in format over its life.
However, this year’s show served as a disappointing reminder of just how truly stuck in the past the Golden Globes are when the overwhelming majority of awards were given to white, straight, cisgender actors and filmmakers. The lily white proceedings ended with “12 Years A Slave,” a film with a largely black cast and creative team, deservedly winning the prize for best drama film, but not before the film lost its other six bids for awards.
Don Cheadle, Sofia Vergara, Lupita Nyong’o, Oscar Isaac, Barkhad Abdi and Kerry Washington all went home empty-handed. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Idris Elba both lost twice.
In terms of LGBTQ winners and nominees, the pickings were even slimmer. Jim Parsons was, to my knowledge, the only publicly LGBTQ nominee. Instead of seeing LGBTQ people included in the night’s festivities, viewers were made to sit through Jared Leto’s uncomfortable jokes about waxing his body to play a transgender woman dying of AIDS in “Dallas Buyer’s Club” (all fun and games for him from the sound of it) and Michael Douglas’s cringe-worthy declaration of “no homo” (in as many words) as he accepted a trophy for playing Liberace.
So why does all this matter? It’s crass and absurd to suggest that anyone deserves a Golden Globe simply because they’re not white, not straight, not cis, etc., right? And these award shows are meaningless, right?
As silly as award shows may seem, this lack of representation does matter. LGBTQ young people are left with very little to aspire to as their identities are ignored at best and made the punchline of jokes otherwise. Representation starts to matter. Similarly, when young people of color see nominees of color passed over repeatedly and instead made into monologue jokes for Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, representation matters. When a film so heavily lauded and beloved as “12 Years A Slave” walks away with just one award and none for its individual parts, representation matters.
Another Sunday night television event was the premiere of the new season of HBO’s “Girls,” a show that has been repeatedly criticized for its lack of diversity in casting. “Girls” and its unapologetically monochromatic cast serve as a reminder of the importance of telling stories that are diverse and specific and engaging. Representation of marginalized groups can be miraculous in the way it opens doors for young people in those groups. In the words of Marian Wright Edelman, “You can’t be what you can’t see.”
Noah Cannon is a junior majoring in telecommunication and film. His column runs biweekly on Tuesdays.
