Next Monday, members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association will gather at the Beverly Hilton to announce this year’s Golden Globe nominees—a once-routine tradition that, given the dramatic events of the past year, will be anything but. In an effort to move past its very public problems and hold on to the Golden Globes’ position as an awards-season bellwether, the HFPA and its recently elected president Helen Hoehne would like to emphasize that they have reformed.
“As hard as the work was, I’m actually grateful for the changes,” Hoehne says, in her first broad interview about the situation. “This is the new HFPA 2.0.” Among those changes are an updated code of conduct; the addition of a chief diversity officer, people of color and outside advisers brought onto the board of directors, advisory board, and the credentials committee; 21 new members (including six Black journalists) with the intention of adding more next year; and a five-year partnership with the NAACP.
Despite their new leader’s optimistic outlook, the organization faces an uphill struggle. The HFPA may be ready to bring back the Golden Globes, but the rest of Hollywood is not so eager. NBC is sticking to its decision not to televise the awards ceremony in January, after noting that it would be open to discussing a 2023 broadcast once “meaningful reform” had taken place. Many studios, networks, entertainment publicists, and their celebrity clients believe that it is too soon for the Golden Globes to resume business as usual.
“They are on the right road,” one top entertainment publicist told me. “They’re just not there yet.” A studio source echoed those concerns: “It’s not like they can hire [21 new] members and act like, Yep, everything’s solved! I think the industry feels like, Okay, do the work, and let’s talk about it next season; you’re welcome to choose your winners this year, but we’re not going to participate.'"
The Golden Globes has long been Hollywood’s messiest major award show—in front of the camera and behind the scenes. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the tiny group that presides over the ceremony, has been under fire for decades, for reasons 2016 host Ricky Gervais pointed out on stage. He called the award “a bit of metal that some nice old confused journalists wanted to give you in person so they could meet you and have a selfie with you.”
Back in 1968, NBC chose to stop televising the Globes for several years after the Federal Communications Commission declared that the ceremony “substantially misleads the public as to how the winners were chosen and the procedures followed in choosing them.” Members were later accused of extortion and sexual harassment. In 2003, one was suspended for throwing wine at another member’s face at a party for the movie Gangs of New York. Actor Brendan Fraser accused longtime HFPA member Philip Berk of groping him at a public event in 2003. (Berk denies Fraser’s account.)
All that is the backdrop for the most recent blowup. In April 2021, Berk (an eight-term past HFPA president) emailed fellow members an article that called Black Lives Matter a “racist hate movement.” It leaked to the press, in the wake of a Los Angeles Times exposé revealing that the group had no Black members. (Berk was expelled from the HFPA for his comments.) A core group of women of color—including actors, creators, filmmakers, and representatives—drafted a list of reforms they wanted to see, backed by a coalition of more than 100 entertainment P.R. firms. Bron Studios marketing executive Cassandra Butcher told me she felt that as people of color, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, “we could no longer enable, participate in or ignore the injustice and inequity in our own industry.” Time’s Up then spearheaded a campaign in which A-list figures like Scarlett Johansson, Shonda Rhimes, Ava Duvernay, Mark Ruffalo, Sterling K. Brown, and Tom Cruise spoke out to demand change.
Less than a year later, the HFPA is asking the industry to recognize its reform efforts. “We undertook a lot of restructuring and implemented a lot of training,” Hoehne says: “Diversity, equity, inclusion training; implicit bias [and] harassment training.… We’ve really changed the entire governance [structure]...because we’re in it for the long run."
Changing the group’s management and rethinking how its members are chosen were top priorities. The HFPA has long been considered an insular group of international journalists with an enormous amount of unchecked power, choosing the Golden Globe winners and benefiting from paid positions on the nonprofit’s committees. This year, the group brought in an outside counsel and outside advisers across the organization. Updated bylaws broadened the admission criteria, and all existing members had to sign a new code of conduct that includes an anti-harassment and nondiscrimination pledge and a disciplinary process for rule-breakers.
Jeff Harris, one of the new independent HFPA board members and a former nonprofit executive focused on racial justice, says he sees his role as someone who can “really hold the organization accountable. To make sure that they weren’t just paying lip service.” Along the way, he says, “there have been some charged conversations, even at the board level. You know, you get a group of people together from all sorts of different countries, and not everyone’s going to agree on everything. But the general thrust of where we’re going is to really evolve this organization.”
During the process of internal soul-searching, the HFPA reached out to the NAACP (among other groups) for feedback. Kyle Bowser of the NAACP’s Hollywood bureau agreed to partner with the group. Under the banner of the “Reimagine Coalition,” they are discussing a number of possible projects, including scholarships, mentorships, and a Nigerian film festival. Rather than getting intimately involved in the HFPA’s internal reforms, the NAACP “sought to recruit them to join our efforts to reform the larger ecosystem of the industry,” he says. “We felt that the HFPA could be a case study—a template, if you will, by which the rest of the industry might take heed and make adjustments of their own.”
Could the HFPA really serve as an enlightened beacon for the rest of hypocritical Hollywood?
“This problem is so much bigger than the Hollywood Foreign Press,” says Kelley Carter, a senior entertainment writer for ESPN’s The Undefeated and one of the HFPA’s six new Black members. “There are people who came out in allyship and were very vocal about what was happening in the HFPA,” she says of performers who criticized the group. “And I was thinking, You’ve never said yes to sit down and interview with me—I’m one of a few Black female journalists [in Hollywood], and you decline every time you’ve had a major movie come out.”
Before she joined, Carter, who is the former chair of the National Association of Black Journalists’ Arts and Entertainment Task Force, was annoyed by the idea that the HFPA couldn’t find any qualified candidates of color. She also worried that she might be trotted out to do publicity or that her presence might feel performative. “I didn’t want to look like a sacrificial Black lamb,” she says, laughing.
“My grandmother used to say that I was the fly in the churn of buttermilk—like a speck of blackness in this sea of whiteness. I was always put in positions where I had to educate and inform people about otherness,” she continues. Joining the HFPA, “I knew I was going to have to come in and be okay with being a teacher or an educator at times.” But Carter believes that the presence of new members will make a huge difference—“not just being able to vote for this upcoming [awards] season, but also the conversations that we’re able to have with voters who have been part of HFPA for years.… That can lead to the progression that I think everyone is looking for.”
When I ask Hoehne about past incidents of racism within the group, she says, “Look, we can’t change the past. We can only change the present and the future, and we’re certainly doing everything in our power to become more inclusive.” She says that the group will learn from the new members—“to look at things differently, to become more open”—and notes that the HFPA plans to bring on more new members next year, bringing it up to about 125 in total.
This falls short of the demands by the coalition pushing for reform, which proposed 300 as a good number to represent global diversity. They also requested raising standards in membership criteria, since some longtime members seem to barely practice journalism anymore and have been known to act more like autograph hounds or insult comics than professional reporters. (Current members need to show just eight pieces of paid journalistic work over the past two years.)
Hoehne says that the new bylaws allow for disciplining any bad behavior; they also include a process for reporting grievances via a confidential hotline. But publicist Marcel Pariseau, whose client list includes Scarlett Johansson, had a recent experience that left him skeptical. The organization’s new rules included a ban on syndicating HFPA–derived materials and recycling old material. But Pariseau came across a recent story by an HFPA member about Johansson framed as if it were an in-person interview about Black Widow, when in fact it was cobbled together from past articles and press conferences. “I called the HFPA on it and said, This is bogus. This did not happen.” His emailed complaint was not kept confidential because it was not reported via the official hotline, and, according to Pariseau, the offender remains a member.
For her part, Hoehne argues that the industry is unfairly boycotting the HFPA. “Since February, we’ve had no interviews, and it has been very difficult for us,” she says, especially in an increasingly challenging media landscape. “I feel like from our side, we’ve pretty much done everything that we said we would do to reform the press conferences to make them more more inclusive, have an etiquette around them, even have sensitivity training, when it comes to the questions that are being asked. Yet, we’re not really getting anything back in return from the publicists.”
One veteran publicist isn’t so sympathetic: “These people had an outsized amount of power, and they abused it.” There are great, legitimate journalists in the HFPA, but with so many problematic members remaining in the group, “how can we look our clients in the eye and go, ‘It’s safe to walk back in that room?’” Even so, the publicists I interviewed say there is no across-the-board ban on access to screenings and interviews for HFPA members; they are taking requests on an individual basis, just as they would from any journalist. One of the new Black members, KJ Matthews, confirms, “I’m still being given access to screen certain films and to go to certain events. I haven’t run up against any roadblocks so far.” (Matthews is a former CNN entertainment reporter and currently a regular contributor to Deutsche Welle’s English TV network, BBC World Service radio, and Ireland's RTÉ.)
The thing that most startled insiders was the HFPA’s decision to go ahead with the 2022 Golden Globes ceremony, despite NBC’s decision not to televise it and a widespread feeling in Hollywood that it was too soon. Hoehne says that skipping the Globes this year was never an option, because handing out awards is a 78-year-old tradition. “I can say with confidence that it’s not going to be the regular award show,” she adds. “We realize that this is not the tone this year, so we are taking a humble approach for 2022—we’re just honoring the people we think showed most excellence in 2021.”
The Globes have traditionally been a key moment in the awards season, and have served as a cash cow for the industry. Hollywood insiders generally don’t want to see the show fold permanently. They just want to see proof of deep and lasting transformation, rather than a CGI illusion.
“Sometimes it takes a hard wake-up call to change,” says Hoehne, who agrees that much of the criticism lobbed at HFPA was justified. “But then when you make the changes, I think everyone deserves a second chance.”
NAACP’s Bowser, too, is rooting for the HFPA. “With all of the animus that’s been hurled at them, if they can make the change, then imagine what else can be done?”
This article has been updated.
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