It’s All a Show, People!

"Speak it, Ricky," spake a professional communicator friend on Facebook. 

She was praising Golden Globes Awards' hired badboy emcee Ricky Gervais for having directed honorees, "If you win, come up, accept your little award tonight, thank your agent and your God, and fuck off. No one cares about your views on politics or culture."

Questioning the intellects of actors is an old gambit. "Of all actors, the most offensive to the higher cerebral centers is the one who pretends to intellectuality," wrote H.L. Mencken about a hundred years ago. "No man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor." 

But if actors aren't brainiacs—how about people who watch Hollywood awards shows un-ironically? To anyone who takes the Golden Globes the least bit seriously as an important cultural affair—well, the actors's speeches might actually bring them news that the continent of Australia on fire or that there's a political movement to severely limit abortion laws in America.

So good for Dicky Ricky for publicly afflicting the smug. And good for the actors for defying him with all the pathos they've got. And best of all for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, for manufacturing the whole melodrama.

It's all part of the show.

Professional wrestling fans know that. Shouldn't professional communicators?