For your information, Ms Streep, tens of millions of ordinary Americans love football and the MMA and would be quite happy watching their favourite sports at the expense of the next Woody Allen film.
Her real target, though, was Trump. She’d come to take him down, and that is exactly what she proceeded to do.
‘There were many powerful performances this year that did breathtaking, compassionate work,’ she said. ‘But there was one performance that stunned me. It sank it hooks in my heart, not because it was good – there’s nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. 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.’
Meryl’s bottom lip began to tremble.
‘It kind of broke my heart when I saw it,’ she cried, ‘and I still can’t get it out of my head. This instinct to humiliate when it’s modelled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, filters down into everybody’s life because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.’
Hmmm.
Really, Meryl?
For starters, the incident to which she referred didn’t happen last year, it happened in 2015. There’s even been another Golden Globes in between then and now, at which it was never mentioned.
Second, Trump has always furiously denied – and has again today on Twitter – he was mocking the reporter’s disability and a Conservative website produced video evidence of numerous other instances where he made the exact same gesture to fully able-bodied people when attacking them.
Third, the reporter is hardly a powerless individual with ‘no capacity to fight back’; he’s a long-time Pulitzer-prize winning investigative journalist at the New York Times, a paper that’s trashed Trump for decades.
But putting all that to one side for a moment – and if Trump WAS mocking a man’s disability then I agree it was disgraceful – let’s move to what Streep said next: ‘Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.’
At this point, I laughed out loud with incredulity.
Not at the words themselves, which are laudable.
No, it was at the hypocrisy.
You’d be hard-pushed to find an industry that encourages more disrespect and violence than Hollywood.
A place where rich powerful people make billions of dollars by regularly pandering to the lowest common denominators of sexism, racism, homophobia and misogyny.
And happily exploit ever more hideous, graphic violence to make a fast, easy buck.
And seethe from every tinsel-encrusted pore with the very kind of nasty, power-based bullying that Meryl Streep claims to be so incensed by in Trump.
So great though her censorious words indisputably are, they would be perhaps better directed at her own back yard.
To highlight just one example of Streep’s shocking hypocrisy, what about the 2003 Oscars when she leaped to her feet and gave child rapist Roman Polanski a standing ovation after he was announced as winner of Best Director for The Pianist?