"Speak it, Ricky," spake a professional communicator friend on Facebook.
She was praising Golden Globes Awards' hired badboy emcee Ricky Gervais for having directed honorees, "If you win, come up, accept your little award tonight, thank your agent and your God, and fuck off. No one cares about your views on politics or culture."
Questioning actors' intellects is an old sport. "Of all actors, the most offensive to the higher cerebral centers is the one who pretends to intellectuality," wrote H.L. Mencken about a hundred years ago. "No man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor." I read that when I was young, and ever since, I've been looking for exceptions. Over a quarter century, I've identified Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Lily Tomlin and Bryan Cranston. Take that, Mencken!
But you know whose intellects I have an even lower estimate of than actors'? People who watch Hollywood awards shows for any reason other than an ironic laugh, aided by a giggly strain of sativa. To anyone who takes the Golden Globes the least bit seriously as an Important Cultural Event—well, the actors's speeches might actually bring them news that the continent of Australia is on fire or that there's a political movement to severely limit abortion laws in America.
So good for Dicky Ricky for publicly afflicting the smug. And good for the actors for "defying" him with all the pathos they've got. And best of all for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, for manufacturing the whole melodrama.
It's all part of the show.
How many times are you going to fall for it?
Gervais said, “No one cares about your views on politics or culture.”
Perhaps he should take heed to what he said.