Golden Globes 2020: Ricky Gervais hits Hollywood stars exactly where it hurts By Kyle Smith *****
https://nypost.com/2020/01/05/golden-globes-2020-ricky-gervais-hits-hollywood-stars-exactly-where-it-hurts/
How Hollywood sees itself: dedicated craftsmen, important artists, world thought leaders. How Ricky Gervais (and everyone else) sees them: criminals, perverts and dopes — a gang of pretentious jerkwads who dropped out of high school when people noticed they were pretty, then mistakenly started to think their insights on world affairs matter. Hired to host the Golden Globes for the fifth and last time, Gervais saw it as his duty to tell Hollywood to eff off, and that’s exactly what he did. All those comics who think they’re “bold,” they “bite the hand that feeds them,” they “speak truth to power” — this is how it’s done.
“Let’s have a laugh — at your expense,” Ricky the G warned the roomful of celebrities, machers and blowhards in the only awards show that’s worth watching anymore because it’s the only one that would think of hiring someone like Gervais to host it. Thank you, thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and yes, you have my permission to print this column in the Bulgarian scandal sheets and Azerbaijani websites you work for.
Gervais (slugging what looked like a pint of beer but probably wasn’t) told the swells that if the Academy Awards could fire Kevin Hart for having made offensive tweets in the past, the Globes should have taken the hint. “Hello?’ Gervais said. ”Lucky for me the Hollywood Foreign Press can barely speak English.” He mentioned arriving in a limo and said, “Felicity Huffman made the license plate.” Ouch. Half the people in that room worked with Felicity Huffman and probably a lot more than half pulled strings to get their kids into college. Gervais was as welcome as a guy who breaks wind in an elevator. Tom Hanks looked like he’d just had a bowl of arsenic bisque. He looked almost as bad as I did when I watched “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”
Gervais told a roomful of people terrified of Ronan Farrow that they “all have one thing in common — they’re all terrified of Ronan Farrow.” For good measure he added, “He’s coming for you.” Shot of a disgusted Jonathan Pryce. Gervais zinged Hollywood’s favorite safe, comfy emcee: “The world saw James Corden as a fat pussy. He was also in the movie ‘Cats.’”
The more eyeball bullets got fired at him, the funnier Gervais got. Plugging his own Netflix show “AfterLife,” Gervais noted that he plays a guy who considers killing himself but “in the end, he didn’t kill himself. Just like Jeffrey Epstein.” Pause. Gasps. Hurt feelings. Then, the follow-through: “Sorry, I know he’s your friend.” Bam.
He went after Leonardo DiCaprio for dating girls young enough to be his daughter, said Martin Scorsese was too short to ride theme-park rides and called Joe Pesci “Baby Yoda.” As two actresses who now work for Apple (Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston) prepared to come on stage, he told the ranks of the aggressively progressive that Apple is “a company who runs sweatshops in China. You say you’re ‘woke’ … If ISIS started a streaming service, you’d call your agent.”
In a roomful of habitual self-deluders who enjoy telling each other that gay people weren’t allowed on TV before Ellen DeGeneres (even though the same show flashed images of all the magazine covers that celebrated her for coming out), inviting Gervais to host was like inviting a pin to a balloon party. He even went after Hollywood’s race obsession: He said he rejected the idea of doing a death reel because “When I saw the list of people who died, it wasn’t diverse enough, it was mostly white people and I thought, no, not on my watch.”
Gervais saved his best for the wrapup of his opening monologue, telling Hollywood exactly what you would tell it if you ever got the chance. “You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything,” he said. “You know nothing about the real world. Most of you’ve spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg … So if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your God and f–k off. Okay?” Thanks to Ricky Gervais, this was the most hilarious LA bloodbath since the climax of “Once Upon a Time in … Hollywood.”
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