Special report. The Golden Globes had always retained at least the pretense of independent judgment, that of peers or critics. The acquisition of the Globes by Eldridge Industries has now set a precedent for a different conception: awards as commercial asset, directly managed by a corporate entity, part of a vertically integrated entertainment group.

written by Luca Celada

LOS ANGELES

December 27, 2023

For the last 15 years, as a Los Angeles correspondent for il manifesto, I was a member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the guild of Hollywood based foreign correspondents that voted on the Golden Globe Awards. The HFPA has now been disbanded and supplanted by the Golden Globes Association, a corporate entity owned by Eldridge Industries. Its members have turned into employees, something I have opted not to become.

When I joined, the group was a non-profit association of journalists working for foreign publications. It organized press conferences with film and TV artists, directors and show runners. At the end of the year, they crammed catch-up screenings of movies and series and voted on nominations for the awards that had risen to be second only to the Academy Awards for prestige, and quite a bit more fun.

As successful as that model was for decades, the awards’ fall from grace was abrupt, spectacular and worthy of a Hollywood melodrama. In 2021 the Globes and the HFPA were the object of an unprecedented industry boycott, ostensibly motivated by the group’s discriminatory policies. Studios disavowed the HFPA. Publicists withheld talent and canceled all press conferences with association members, stars returned Globes to the West Hollywood headquarters as if radioactive. And NBC canceled a multi-year broadcast license for the awards ceremony, worth hundreds of millions.

The official narrative would point to the absence of Black members in the group of foreign journalists as evidence of racial bias, and the elevated median age that came with the insularity, did explain in part the casual racism of some members’ pronouncements. In fact, however, the problem was more deep-rooted than the discrimination and under-representation that are systemic in the industry.

Clearly the association had problems of inclusivity, related to limiting admissions of new members in general, as these were seen as potential competitors by an entrenched old guard. The racial reckoning nevertheless laid bare the tone-deafness of a privileged group, unable to perceive the moral urgency of the moment, and undertake the reforms that the industry and society rightly demanded. Time and again internal attempts at reforms were thwarted, to the point of rejecting even the DEI consultant the board proposed to hire in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Born at the height of the studio system to increase Hollywood access for foreign journalists who were pretty well ignored by the publicity machine, its awards became wildly successful and the HFPA ended up protecting its exclusivity to a fault, until the privilege fatally impaired its capacity for self-reflection.

Now, in 2020, faced with extinction, it was forced to undertake a process of reform too long deferred. From an association of journalists, one might have expected a period of internal discussion and self-reflection; what transpired instead would be the combination of tightly restricted debate and highly managed public communication, common to disgraced corporations.

A small army of “professionals” was engaged to........

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