Viola Davis honoured her mentor and friend at last night’s Golden Globes ceremony when she presented her with the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the star-studded ceremony.
Those who tuned in will agree that Davis’ introduction was just as memorable as the headline-making speech Streep followed it with.
Video In-Article Ad (Desktop)Watch below…
Video In-Article Ad (Desktop)Read Streep’s speech below:
Video In-Article Ad (Desktop)Video In-Article Ad (Desktop)I love you all. You have to forgive me, I have lost my voice in screaming and lamentation this weekend and I have lost my mind sometime earlier this year so I have to read.
Video In-Article Ad (Desktop)Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press. Just to pick up on what Hugh Laurie said, you and all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments of American society right now. Think about it: Hollywood, foreigners and the press.
Video In-Article Ad (Desktop)But who are we and, you know, what is Hollywood, anyway? It’s just a bunch of people from other places. I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey, Viola was born in a sharecropper’s cabin in South Carolina, came up in Central Falls, R.I. Sarah Paulson was born in Florida, raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids from Ohio, Amy Adams was born in Vicenza, Veneto, Italy and Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificates?
Video In-Article Ad (Desktop)And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in Lon – no, in Ireland, I do believe, and she’s here nominated for playing a small-town girl from Virginia. Ryan Gosling, like all the nicest people, is Canadian. And Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London and is here playing an Indian raised in Tasmania. So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners and if we kick them all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.
Video In-Article Ad (Desktop)They gave me three seconds to say this, so. 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. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that, breathtaking, compassionate work.
Video In-Article Ad (Desktop)But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart, not because it was good, it was – there’s nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth.
Video In-Article Ad (Desktop)It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he outranked in privilege and power and the capacity to fight back. It, 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 real life. And this instinct to humiliate when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.
Video In-Article Ad (Desktop)Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose. OK, go on with that thing. OK, this brings me to the press. We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call them on the carpet for every outrage.
Video In-Article Ad (Desktop)That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in our constitution. So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood foreign press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists, ’cause we’re going to need them going forward and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.
Video In-Article Ad (Desktop)One more thing. Once when I was standing around the set one day, whining about something, we were going to work through supper or the long hours or whatever, Tommy Lee Jones said to me: “Isn’t it such a privilege, Meryl, just to be an actor?” Yeah, it is. And we have to remind each other of the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy. We should be very proud of the work Hollywood honors here tonight,
Video In-Article Ad (Desktop)As my, as my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once: “Take your broken heart, make it into art.”
Video In-Article Ad (Desktop)Thank you, Foreign Press.
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![Black Girls Rock! Beyonce, Viola Davis, Lizzo, & Samara Joy Enjoyed Historic Wins at the 2023 GRAMMYs [Year in Review]](https://thatgrapejuice.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/viola-davis-thatgrapejuice-2023-lizzo-grammys-beyonce-samara-joy-464x260.jpg "Black Girls Rock! Beyonce, Viola Davis, Lizzo, & Samara Joy Enjoyed Historic Wins at the 2023 GRAMMYs [Year in Review].")
Riveting speech! Streep is Queen, and Trump will deal lol
He called her overrated, as expected. According to him, she “attacked” him. All of the beloveds we lost last year and yet we still have this glorified tangerine making a travesty of what should be the most respected position in our country. God, wyd??
You know there were clear Trump supporters in the room, and Meryl read them down with no fear. Thank you for taking a stance for whats right and further exposing what is wrong.
I know OMG Logic is seething at all this black excellence.
That was my favorite moment. Two women I love. Meryl is practically perfect in my eyes, greatest actress in Hollywood, she’s the standard, respected by everyone, her mind is as beautiful as her soul, and I’m just obsessed with Viola Davis, can’t get enough of her, marvelous woman.
These are gracious, smart women we should look up to. No shade, but the popstars people are stanning for around here would have a lot to learn from these types of icons.
Amazing speech, two incredible women. One thing that makes them both so compelling is an unreliance on looks.., and that is not to say that either of them are not attractive, far from it. It’s more that neither have sexed themselves up for increased popularity. As a result their talent is what continues to speak loudest for them.
Congratulations to her