The Golden Globes are a good reminder you don’t need to take everyone’s judgment seriously
The outrage over the Golden Globes is as much an annual ritual as the awards ceremony itself. Every year, movie lovers lament the statuette handed out to a movie such as the maudlin cross-racial-friendship film “Green Book” or the star who’s nominated for a mediocre role just because the HFPA wants that person to attend.
Every year, calmer voices offer the same response: The members of the association are nothing but a small, idiosyncratic bunch notorious for being easily influenced. This year, that critique landed with particular force: The Los Angeles Times just published a wide-ranging investigation into alleged self-dealing at the HFPA, including a junket at which the promoters of the confectionery TV show “Emily in Paris” put more than 30 foreign journalists up at the ritzy Peninsula Paris hotel and the high monthly payment members receive for serving on various committees. This is not a decision-making body worth obsessing over.
With this annual melodrama in mind, we non-celebrities might do well to consider whose judgments are worth taking seriously. Given simmering, if nebulous, concerns about “cancel culture,” it’s a reality check to remember that not all criticism — or praise — is meaningful, and not all of it has real power.
Take the challenge of achieving a healthy relationship to social media, which is notable both for its speed and its leveling effect. No matter how lowly a person is, they can talk to, or at least in the general direction of, some of the most famous and powerful figures on the planet.
The upside potential is obvious. Users can get exposed to new ideas and perspectives. People who were traditionally marginalized by gatekeeping institutions in media and academia can make themselves heard in new ways.
Still, the speed and scope of social media have pitfalls, too. The pace of posting and the possibility of anonymity or deception mean people can’t be sure they have a good sense of who’s arguing with them. Is the person peppering your feed a true expert, an irksome reply guy or someone very good at weaponizing the strong emotions that dominate the Internet for fun and profit? Are they interested in actually talking to you, or are you simply a prop in a branding exercise? Depending on the answers to those questions, it’s perfectly reasonable to disregard a speaker. It might even be liberating to decide not to care.
Someone is always going to be wrong somewhere on the Internet, or in a pool of awards voters. It’s up to us how much time and energy we devote to the silliest of those wrong ideas.
In an era of rampant misinformation, some experts suggest that it’s actually wiser to examine a source first rather than diving into a fight without bothering to understand who’s making the argument or where an idea is coming from. As the New York Times’s Charlie Warzel has noted, conspiracy theorists, among others, have weaponized the tools of critical thinking to get people to skip that first, vital step, and instead to dig themselves deeper into rabbit holes.
And if Hollywood can’t stop falling all over the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the new movie “Malcolm & Marie” at least demonstrates how corrosive it can be to give someone you don’t respect an open-ended, rent-free lease on your mental energy.
Malcolm, a movie director, spends much of the film in hysterics over what a critic he despises will think of his new movie. “Normally, I’d wish death upon someone like this. Someone who lacks the imagination like this,” Malcolm grouses after nitpicking the review, which turns out to be a rave, to bits. “But instead I’ll just pray she gets carpal tunnel until her hands atrophy and cramp and she can’t write nonsensical garbage like this anymore.”
Where’s the proportion or sense of fun in thinking about another person like that? On Sunday, take the Golden Globes as the often-ridiculous, occasionally delightful spectacle it is, preferably with a glass of bubbly. And on Monday, carry that spirit of skepticism and amusement with you. It’s a lot more useful than vacillating between outrage and shame.
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