Yes, the controversy has been mounting for months: first from Los Angeles Times exposés in February that highlighted the association’s insular culture, millions of dollars of self-dealing payments and total exclusion of Black members, then an open letter signed by more than 100 Hollywood publicity firms calling for “profound and lasting change.” Time’s Up published a list of suggested reforms. Last week, Scarlett Johansson urged fellow celebs to “step back from the HFPA,” and on Monday, Tom Cruise returned his three Globe statuettes in symbolic protest.
But according to sources contacted by Vulture, the association doomed its own 2022 event with its Monday announcement of “transformational” reforms that critics immediately faulted for rolling out too slowly, thereby leaving the same regime largely intact until at least 2023.
The association has long been considered corrupt by critics and other members of the press, but that’s not what people are really mad about.
While happy enough to oblige the eccentric, 87-member group of international entertainment journalists’ whims when it came to providing gifts, entry to champagne receptions, free travel arrangements and innumerable selfies with celebrity clients, sources note that publicists have quietly fumed over the association’s intractable all-or-none demands.
As evidence of HFPA malfeasance and internal chaos mounted in the pages of the Los Angeles Times, sources tell us, these publicists saw their chance to hold the HFPA to a higher standard while also reestablishing the power dynamic to gain greater control.
And by the time Universal flew association members to New York in 1992 for an elaborate press junket for Al Pacino’s Scent of a Woman — which, perhaps not coincidentally, ended up besting such acclaimed movies as Unforgiven, The Crying Game, and A Few Good Men in the Drama, Motion Picture category the following year — the Globes’ reputation as an unserious, suspected bribe- and advertising-driven event had become received wisdom within Hollywood’s 30-mile zone.
Once the show started to be produced by Dick Clark Productions and broadcast by NBC in the ’90s, however, the Globes evolved into a reliable star chamber for major celebrities and Serious Actors alike: a fun and fizzy awards-season pit stop unfolding in late January, just days before the end of the Oscars voting period.Richard Rushfield, editor-in-chief of the entertainment-industry newsletter The Ankler, said that he finds the “I’m shocked, shocked to find gambling is going on in here!” tone of the publicists’ March 15 open letter more than a little disingenuous.
Highly placed sources from across the Awards Industrial Complex called the publicists the “primary aggressor” in penalizing the HFPA and ultimately pushing the Globes off the air, which most likely would not have occurred without their continuing involvement.
Rushfield feels the publicists staked out a position of rejecting the HFPA’s reforms even before any changes had been announced, pointing out their demand for the association to “swiftly manifest profound and lasting change” held the HFPA to a much higher standard than they did the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the aftermath of the #OscarsSoWhite controversy in 2015.
Recent controversies — such as eight-term HFPA president Philip Berk calling Black Lives Matter a “racist hate movement” in April and HFPA member Margaret Gardiner asking Oscar winner Daniel Kaluuya what it meant “to be directed by Regina” at the Oscars — underscored the perception that the HFPA is out of touch with contemporary cultural sensitivities.
If the publicists’ letter suddenly held the HFPA to a new level of accountability, then Netflix’s opposition may have been the tipping point for a series of corporate boycotts.
In the lead up to this year’s Globes, the streaming giant outspent every other studio, heavily promoting movies and series including The Trial of the Chicago 7, Hillbilly Elegy, The Queen’s Gambit, and Emily in Paris .
Planning to increase membership by 50 percent in 18 months, the association’s board committed to adding 20 new members by August of this year, but made no specific guarantees membership will diversify enough to impact voting on the 2022 Globes.
With more foresight, the organization might have instead taken its own initiative to push pause on the event for a year and regroup, so it could then return with all the appropriate new-and-improved fanfare in 2023.
Of course, the very same publicity firms who made a great show of standing up to the HFPA now stand to lose an untold fortune in fees with the cancellation of next year’s Globes.
“I can’t help but reflect on the many years that came before this moment when the entire industry was doing flip flops working with the HFPA to garner attention for their films, shows, directors and actors without a thought as to whether or not the organization measured up to diversity, equity and inclusion standards at the most basic level,” the film publicist says in an impassioned email to Vulture.