Some thoughts before last week’s inauguration…
While I enjoyed Meryl Streep’s takedown of Trump at the Golden Globes, I was briefly sad it overshadowed Ryan Gosling’s loving remarks about his “lady.” Eva Mendes tended their babies and took care of her dying brother while Gosling went off to make a fancy singing and dancing movie with Emma Stone and boy is he grateful.
In another era, that would’ve been the sound bite. It’s one thing for a male celebrity to thank his “sweetheart” but Gosling stuck with his perfect guy meme (“Someone looks like she could use a foot rub!”) and gave the most romantic shout-out in recent awards show history.
But it was Streep who won the news cycle with a snarl straight outta “The Devil Wears Prada” landing punch after punch while accepting a lifetime achievement award.
When she sat down, I braced for the inevitable and, of course, it came. Within hours, Trump had tweeted a rebuttal, calling Streep “overrated.” I’m guessing one of his minions told him she has won 3 Oscars but has been nominated 19 times so clearly she’s a hack and a total failure. “Sad.”
Cue predictable whining about how dare a movie star (who isn’t Ronald Reagan) get political. Nothing makes a Trump loyalist madder than seeing a famous person speak out against their guy. It makes them crazy in their thinking place, as Sam Bee calls it.
As fate would have it, I don’t have to look far for an example of this Trump-sanctioned Celebrity Hate Club mentality. In my hometown, a conservative county commissioner lost his mind recently when the performing arts center at the community college booked Whoopi Goldberg to perform as part of its summer season. HOW COULD THEY?!? Book an entertainer? Who, you know, entertains? And is a woman with liberal political opinions?
Somewhere Senator Joe McCarthy is feeling a little hopeful, even as he feels a very intense and urgent need for ice water.
Whoopi, upon learning that an elected official had taken time away from fretting about his county’s opioid abuse epidemic and crumbling infrastructure to protest her comedy act, tweeted to set the record straight. (She never said she’d move to Canada if Trump was elected but the commissioner THOUGHT she did so, well, what’s the difference in the post-truth world?)
They tweeted back and forth throughout the day. Meanwhile, more dead orphans were dug out of the rubble in Aleppo.
Which I only mention because sometimes– like when I say “light cream” at Starbucks only to discover later I have been handed what appears to be a $4 cup of brown milk and I wonder aloud why God hates me– perspective is quickly restored by thinking simply “Aleppo.” Try it; it’s very effective.
Meanwhile, Ryan Gosling is too gracious to quibble about having his swoon-inducing speech nudged to the back burner. I imagine he hurried home to Eva and they ate In-N-Out burgers he thoughtfully picked up and watched “This is Us” together. Perfection in an imperfect world.