Women staged a shocking revolt at the Golden Globes

The sea of black turned out to be a more interesting experiment than anyone suspected

Oprah Winfrey at the Golden Globes
(Image credit: Paul Drinkwater/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)

For all their glitz, awards shows are famously dull affairs. The lovely rich don impossibly expensive costumes to thank people we don't know and it is our privilege to watch them, squeezing joy out of the connective tissue that makes the evening move. The host jokes. The music plays people off. And a meaningless ranking (Best This, Best That) forms and hardens into something like industry truth. There might be a couple of good speeches, but the main thrill an awards show offers is that it's live. There's margin for error. There's a slight risk that this tightly controlled spectacle featuring celebrities who we only see in the most curated contexts might go rogue. Basically, we watch for the surprises, for what isn't supposed to happen.

The Golden Globes has always shared the same basic structure as the stuffier Academy Awards, despite its reputation for being "the fun one." But last night's show, wrenched by the #MeToo movement, became something else entirely: It became a staged revolt against the way women were treated within the industry and outside it. Some of that disruption was planned. Some of it (like Natalie Portman's insertion of a single, powerful phrase) seemed spontaneous. The result wasn't just riveting; it was shocking. Recy Taylor, the woman kidnapped and gang-raped by six white men who were never prosecuted, was trending by the end of the night. Because of an awards show.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.