The 79th annual Golden Globes won’t be televised or streamed Sunday, for the first time since its broadcast debut in the early 1980s. And two …
The 79th annual Golden Globes won’t be televised or streamed Sunday, for the first time since its broadcast debut in the early 1980s. And two former members who resigned from the disgraced Hollywood Foreign Press Association say the organization behind the awards is so corrupt and toxic they doubt it will ever regain its former glory. Wenting Xu, a Chinese journalist based in Los Angeles, and Diederik van Hoogstratten, a Dutch reporter now living in Austin, Texas, left the HFPA in June and both said they don’t miss being part of a group that embarrassed and bullied them. Still, it was a shock to many to learn that the 2022 Golden Globes will be a completely private affair, as the HFPA announced Thursday. Winners’ names will be tweeted out and also published on the Golden Globes website during the ceremony. The event, once arguably the biggest party of the awards season, will not include a red carpet, audience, celebrity presenters or press. “The Globes went from being the most coveted publicity tool in Hollywood to one that not one celebrity will touch,” van Hoogstratten,52, told The Post. “The reason there’s a private event on Sunday is because they could not get one celebrity presenter. That’s a remarkable change. They’re like the like the mafia now. Nobody can be seen with them. The brand has collapsed.” NBC canceled its annual telecast of the awards after the HFPA was lambasted, following years of corruption-related allegations, for having no black members among its roughly 100-strong contingent — leading the group to announce a five-year diversity initiative called the “Reimagine Coalition.” The HFPA, formed in the early 1940s, is made up of journalists from some 55 countries, most of whom are based in the US. Still, Xu,38 who writes for World Screen magazine in China, and van Hoogstratten, who writes for the daily FD as well as the weekly newsmagazine Elsevier in the Netherlands, said they don’t believe diversity was the biggest scandal. Van Hoogstratten said the HFPA had become a bloated, self-important group with as many as 30 committees filled with self-dealing members who were paid for little if any work. “HFPA received vast sums of money from it broadcast contract for the Globes,” he said. “That money, in our view, should not have been spent on members doing jobs within the organization, but instead should [have gone] to worthwhile recipients and philanthropic initiatives. [Members] really seem to be looking out for themselves.
