Hollywood is plagued by liberalism. This is a cliché that has been repeated for decades. In 1996 Charlton Heston told a reporter that there were “more conservatives in the closet in Hollywood than there are homosexuals”. Kelsey Grammer, despite being at one time the highest-paid actor on television, described being a Republican in Hollywood as “having a target on your back”. Campaign contributions for the 2016 US presidential election from the entertainment sector were made overwhelmingly in favour of the Democrats.
But for an industry long-perceived as devoted to progressive values, Hollywood has a way of exposing itself as the opposite over and over again. This year there was no Golden Globes ceremony, and its tainted prizes were given out via a series of tweets. This was the result of ongoing criticism of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which conducts the ceremony and bestows the awards, after it was revealed last year there was not a single black person among its 87 members – and that the former HFPA president, Philip Berk, had forwarded an email that compared the Black Lives Matter movement to Charles Manson’s cult.
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