The biggest stars in TV and film gathered in Beverly Hills in the hopes of kicking off the 2020 awards season with a highly coveted Golden Globe award, and notoriously controversial host Ricky Gervais wasted no time laying into the Hollywood elite vying for a big win.
“This is the last time I’m hosting these awards,” Ricky Gervais said moments after taking the stage at the 77th Golden Globe Awards for his fifth hosting gig. The mood in the room was essentially summed up by everyone’s favorite L.A. neighbor Tom Hanks — this year’s recipient of the HFPA’s Cecil B. DeMille Award — whose face displayed an expression of shock and disgust every time the cameras found him in the crowd. Hilarious.
Ricky called out the many stars in the room for their relationship to large corporations like Apple, Amazon and Disney. One of those jokes that noticeably raised Hanks’s blood pressure was Gervais’s suggestion that the license plate on his HFPA-hired limo was made by Felicity Huffman during her brief prison stay after she was swept up in the college admissions scandal. “It’s her daughter I feel sorry for,” Gervais said, shushing the room. “That must be the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to her. And her dad was in Wild Hogs.”
“Kevin Hart was fired from the Oscars because of some offensive tweets,” he said, before going on to draw a distinction with his own situation. “The HFPA can barely speak English. They barely know what Twitter is! I got the offer by fax. Remember, they’re just jokes. We’re all going to die soon, and there’s no sequel.”
Gervais proved anything but embarrassed as he continued to call out the rich and famous on their privileged lifestyle. “If you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a political platform to make a political speech,” he warned. “You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything, you know nothing about the real world. Most of you 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*** off. OK?”
Of course, that rule didn’t apply to the host himself, who took more than a few potshots at current political events. “In this room are some of the most important TV and film executives in the world, and they all have one thing in common: They’re all terrified of Ronan Farrow,” Gervais said, referring to the journalist whose reporting has helped bring down such Hollywood titans as Harvey Weinstein and Les Moonves. Meanwhile, tech world titan, Tim Cook, looked in shocked as Gervais praised Apple TV+’s marquee series The Morning Show as a “superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing made by a company who owns sweatshops in China. You say you’re woke but the companies you work for — Apple, Amazon, Disney — if ISIS started a streaming service, you would call your agent, wouldn’t you?”
Gervais didn’t leave his own employer, Netflix, out of his streaming service broadside. “You could binge-watch the entire first season of After Life and it’s still more fun than this,” he said, referring to his most recent series about a man who contemplates suicide after his wife dies. “Season 2 is on the way, so in the end he obviously didn’t kill himself — just like Jeffrey Epstein. I know he’s your friend, but I don’t care!”
Check out clips below for some of the top jokes of the night.
