With her latest acceptance speech, Meryl Streep divided all Gaul — meaning everyone detested by the incoming administration, and by the people who voted for it — into three parts:
Hollywood. Foreign. Press.
Donald Trump’s very own “deplorables,’’ in other words.
Her words kicked off awards season 2017 and served notice that it wasn’t going to go quietly.
Streep — accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award, an honor elected and handed out by the writers of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association — used Sunday’s 74th annual Golden Globes to mount a spirited and angry defense of Trumplandia’s chief troika of boogeymen: overpaid celebrities, scary foreign people, and media know-it-alls. Everyone that he and his fan base are convinced are nothing like them.
Streep’s reply: We are exactly like you.
“What is Hollywood, anyway? It’s just a bunch of people from other places,’’ the actress mused before ticking off the birthplaces of some of those attending: New Jersey (Streep), a sharecropper’s cabin in South Carolina (Viola Davis), Ohio (Sarah Jessica Parker), Ethiopia by way of Ireland (Ruth Negga), Canada (Ryan Gosling), and so on. Turns out Amy Adams, who seems to have sprouted from the heartland like a stalk of wheat, was born in Italy. Some of them had it easier than others, but you probably can’t guess which ones. It’s never what you think. These people are . . . people.
Honestly, this jibes with my experience as an entertainment reporter over 30-odd years of interviews. Sit a movie star down in a room for an arranged chitchat and 99 times out of 100, he or she will be strenuously pleasant and shockingly average. (The other 1 percent, in my own experience, was the late Lauren Bacall. But legends don’t have to be nice.)
By and large, these are working artisans — it’s just that their work is public, the public tends to go gaga over them, and they get paid a lot. Although most of them get paid less than you think.
Who better than Streep — the matriarch of her Hollywood generation, who unites art and audience appeal in a way no other star really has — to mount a defense of the perceived elite and to remind us of what she and her peers are actually trained to do?
“An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us and let you feel what that feels like,’’ Streep said. Their job is to prompt empathy, in other words.
Everything else — all the celebrity booshwah and red carpet finery — is there because audiences insist on it and pay to see it. Because we live in a system in which star persona is a commodity in a crowded marketplace, and a very profitable one.
Could this be the start of a backlash to the backlash, a defense of what is condemned as “elitism’’ but in many cases is simply the ability to do a job intelligently and well? A reminder that “expertise’’ is not a filthy word but an asset to be cultivated rather than scorned?
In this vein, Streep reminded viewers and the Golden Globes audience that reporters are working men and women, too — individuals from all walks of life — instead of the entitled pooh-bahs we’re often painted as.
Streep called for the “principled press to hold power to account,’’ and the day following the ceremonies saw a spike in donations to the Committee to Protect Journalists, which the actress had cited by name in her speech.
To be sure, the awards podium has always been a place where talented people have shot off their mouths and urged resistance to authority. It generally hasn’t gone well, most notably at the Oscars: Think Marlon Brando and Sacheen Littlefeather in 1973, or Vanessa Redgrave’s “Zionist hoodlums’’ speech in 1978.
The difference this time is that the president-elect, whom Streep didn’t even have to mention by name, is so bizarrely thin-skinned that he has to respond to every criticism with an online playground push.
This can get ugly, as Streep noted when she called out Trump’s 2015 mocking imitation of disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski as a moment that “broke my heart when I saw it.’’
And it can get very, very predictable. Minutes after Streep’s speech, I jokingly tweeted out, “Trump tomorrow: ‘Merrill Strep only good in Death Becomes Her, who remembers her other movies? Overrated!’ ’’
A few hours later, Trump tweeted “Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes’’ and insisted against all YouTube evidence that he didn’t intentionally make fun of Kovaleski.
Donald, bubbe, you’re really going to need to chill out. The awards season has just begun and, emboldened by Mama Meryl, others will surely be raising their voices to protest where they fear you may be taking us. You might want to fasten your seatbelt, as Bette Davis once advised. You can always take the high road and ignore them. But I’m not holding my breath.
Here’s a thing you won’t want to think about but maybe you should. What appear to you to be pampered Hollywood crybabies are in fact citizens as concerned about their country as your followers are. They aren’t very worried about being called out as fat-cat celebrities, given that we’ve just elected a working definition of the phrase. Underneath the glitz, they’re people who are, by and large, pretty good at their jobs. They’re praying that you want to be as well.
Ty Burr can be reached at ty.burr@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @tyburr.
