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When stopped by a red-carpet reporter at the Golden Globes, and asked for his thoughts on celebrities wearing pins referencing the murder of Renee Good, comedian Bill Maher laughed off the idea of making any statement. “We’re just here for show business today,” he said. “It was a terrible thing that happened, and it shouldn’t have happened, and if they didn’t act like such thugs, it wouldn’t have happened. But I don’t need to wear a pin about it.”
Despite not winning in his respective category, Bill Maher got his wish.
For the ceremony that serves as a kickstarter for Oscar season, the Golden Globes has a long, star-studded history of celebrities using the stage to deliver impassioned speeches heard around the world, including by the president of the United States, who a decade ago famously melted down on Twitter (now X) after Meryl Streep criticized him during the broadcast.
This year, however, the president had nothing to worry about.
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On Sunday, January 11, the Golden Globes fully divorced itself from political speech. For an awards show voted on by international journalists who have publicly pledged to diversify and broaden their world view, the ceremony was strikingly tame.
Aside from a pointed joke about CBS News’ decaying journalistic standards, Judd Apatow’s quick, astute remarks about living under a dictatorship, and a memorable Wanda Sykes jab at Ricky Gervais’ transphobic humor, the night was conspicuously PR-friendly. There were no mentions of Trump, Palestine, the kidnapping of the Venezuelan president, or the rising death toll of Iranian protesters.
To be clear: Artists are not obligated to make political statements, but something about this silence felt different. It didn’t feel like disengagement. It felt far more sinister.
In a year when One Battle After Another dominated awards conversation, it was particularly striking that its director and writer, Paul Thomas Anderson, never once addressed politics. For a film that opens with leftist revolutionaries liberating an ICE detention center on the California–Mexico border, the omission was deafening. The absence wasn’t neutral; it was an elephant in the room for anyone watching at home. It signaled something darker: Trump’s quiet takeover of Hollywood is in effect.
To understand the Golden Globes’ silence, one has to understand who was in attendance.
This was not a one-night agreement to keep things light. It was the culmination of years of eroding journalistic standards and executives bending the knee to stay in Trump’s good graces. During the CBS broadcast, cameras lingered not only on A-list stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Timothée Chalamet, and Julia Roberts, but also on the billionaire executives seated among them.
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Prominently featured was David Ellison, a personal friend of Trump and a Paramount executive, whose studio produces the ceremony itself. Ellison, alongside Bari Weiss, axed a 60 Minutes story on Venezuela and played a role in Stephen Colbert’s late-night firing. Also shown was David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros., currently working to sell the studio to Netflix despite Paramount’s objections and lawsuits. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, who previously presented the president with a 24-karat gold plaque, appeared on camera as well.
Then there was Jay Penske, CEO of Penske Media Corporation, which owns Variety, Deadline, Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, and countless other trade publications - and which now operates the Golden Globes themselves. His father, Roger Penske, founder of the company, is a close, personal friend and major Trump donor, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contributions.
When the son of a Trump megadonor, who controls much of Hollywood’s press, presides over an awards show honoring films released by studios run by executives openly courting Trump amid billion-dollar acquisition battles, the silence stops being mysterious -- it becomes procedural.
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The Golden Globes has always been unserious: a self-parody of an industry addicted to its own reflection. Their journalists have long been accused of trading integrity for access, their ceremony repeatedly rescued from irrelevance by scandal rather than substance. That they would seek comfort over courage is not surprising.
What is horrifying is how little resistance it took.
Even though the recent tragic killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis has resulted in a few celebrities (Pedro Pascal, Jamie Lee Curtis, Billie Eilish and others) taking a stand and criticizing the administration, the overall volume has been noticeably turned down.
But at the Golden Globes, there was no blacklist. No loyalty oath. No government mandate. Just a few billionaires in tailored suits, a handful of executives angling for mergers from the FCC, and an entire industry willing to look away.
And when people ask, years from now, where everyone was -- the answer will be preserved in high-definition: smiling, silent, and relieved they didn’t have to say a thing.
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Author Bio:
Ben Friedman is a contributing writer and film critic at Highbrow Magazine.
For Highbrow Magazine