She has played a cancer-ridden drunk in August: Osage County. She portrayed a hardcore Editor-in-Chief of a top fashion magazine in The Devil Wears Prada, and she's even played the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher in Iron Lady. She has been nominated for an Academy Award a whopping 19 times, winning three. She has been nominated for 30 Golden Globes winning eight plus being honored with the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement. She has played the part of a role model, inspiration, and legend in Hollywood, known to be loved yet intimidating by colleagues. Her brilliance lights up a room immediately, forcing everyone to quickly go silent when she speaks. Sunday night was no exception for honoree Meryl Streep.
Friend and fellow Hollywood star, Viola Davis (who won Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture for Fences), gave a remarkable opening speech for Streep. She recanted a conversation they had and how Davis repeatedly was "being scanned" by Streep. She tells of the time they both worked on Doubt, and how she (Davis) was too afraid to tell Streep "how much she means to her" until that moment last night.
With that, Streep took stage in her iconic glasses commanding attention from everyone. Her voice, faint because she has been in "screaming and lamination" the days before her honor, still overtook the room, with dead silence besides for her. Immediately, she thanked the Hollywood Foreign Press to quickly break her speech down to three integral parts: Hollywood, Foreign, and Press. Starting with Hollywood, Streep speaks about what the famed city is composed of: foreigners. Streep herself is from New Jersey. "Viola was born in a sharecropper’s cabin in South Carolina, came up in Central Falls, Rhode Island." She continued with more stars born around the world, playing roles of different ethnicities and nationalities. She mentioned stars from Ruth Negga, to Ryan Gosling, to Dev Patel: "born in Kenya, raised in London, and is here playing an Indian raised in Tasmania."
Streep made the point that being foreign or making others feel foreign or explore foreign topics is what Hollywood is about. "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," the actress said. Streep took her first, subtle, jab at President-Elect, Donald Trump and his notorious immigration policy. "If we kick them (foreigners) all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts." This was met with a roaring applause and stars on their feet. The speech then made a tight turn to a dark moment in American politics, one Streep said she cannot get out of her mind. That would be when President-Elect, Donald Trump, infamously mocked Serge Kovaleski, a Pulitzer Prize journalist writing for The New York Times. Mocking a person, terrible. Mocking an individual with a disability: despicable.
This "performance" is what disturbed the Hollywood starlet most because it wasn't for film but in real life. She explained how horrific it was to sit there and watch the audience laugh at a cruel joke. She believes this type of behavior is what enables others to believe they can and should act in this manner, while in reality: nothing can be more shameful than bullying.
Streep, an advocate for the press, moved onto her final chapter of the speech. "We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call him on the carpet for every outrage. That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in the Constitution." Streep continued by vowing her support to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit organizations whose goal is to promote freedom of press worldwide.
With the Trump administration taking over in less than 15 days, Streep reminded us all that the press is all we're going to have. Trump has already bashed the press on numerous occasions, alleging they are attempting to rig the election, calling former Fox News reporter, Megyn Kelly vulgar names, and alleging that the press mixes his words constantly.
As a journalist, I stand with Streep. One of our nations principles is the freedom of speech and press. The public has the right to know what our government and other public officials are doing. Yet, Trump who said himself "No one believes it (freedom of press) stronger than me," wants to establish laws against it! He told Jim DeFede of CBS's Miami affiliate, WFOR, that England has laws which make it easier to sue against false reports.
But "actual malice," an American law, prohibits this. According to the Washington Post, a simple explanation of "actual malice" is the protection of the press when they know what they are publishing is false because it was "in good spirits." English press laws are considered to be so radical that the US has created laws to protect the American press from British law.
Although everyone knows who the starlet was speaking of, she did not and would not mention Trump's name once. Her artistic intelligence allowed her to swerve around the direct naming. Streep closed her iconic and outspoken speech by quoting close friend, the late Carrie Fischer. "As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once, take your broken heart, make it into art." To read Viola Davis's and Meryl Streep's full speech, click here.
