The 2017 Golden Globes have been chock full of important moments. Ryan Gosling gave us feels upon feels—and proved love is real—in his touching acceptance speech. Everyone teared up at the emotional tribute to Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher. Viola Davis showed us what squad goals are when she presented the Cecile B. DeMille award to Meryl Streep. But the most powerful moment of the awards show came when Streep accepted the lifetime achievement award and delivered a speech so full of quotable moments that it sent Twitter into a tailspin.
Streep used her speech as a platform to send a timely, passionate, and politically-charged message aimed at President-elect Donald Trump. She began by noting how the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is one of “the most vilified segments in American society right now.” After referencing the backgrounds of several Hollywood A-listers (including Gosling, Sarah Paulson, Natalie Portman, and Dev Patel), she joked: “Where are their birth certificates?” Continuing on, Streep cited how “Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners, and if you kick us all out, you’ll have nothing to watch except for football and mixed martial arts, which are not arts.”
“Take your broken heart, turn it into art,”
On a more serious note, Meryl Streep then went on to reference the 2016 incident where then-Presidential candidate Donald Trump publicly mocked a disabled New York Times reporter, Serge Kovaleski. “It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out my head because it wasn’t in a movie, it was in real life,” Streep said of the moment. “That instinct to humiliate when it’s modeled by someone in a public platform, it filters down into everyone’s life because it gives permission for others to do the same.”
“Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence,” Streep said. “When the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose.”
After calling for the press to take a stand against President-elect Trump (“We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call them on the carpet for every outrage.”), Streep closed by quoting the late Carrie Fisher. “Take your broken heart, turn it into art,” she said through tears. The speech was met with a rousing applause at the The Beverly Hilton—and even more praise flooded in on Twitter.
Source: Glamor Magazine