If you were rooting for everybody Black during this year’s 82nd Annual Golden Globe Awards broadcast, you may have walked away from the show a bit disappointed. Despite several Black nominees (including Denzel Washington, Cynthia Erivo, Colman Domingo, Ayo Edebiri, and Quinta Brunson), only Zoe Saldaña walked away with a Best Supporting Actress win for her work in Emilia Perez (as she deserved!). Saldaña’s speech was emotional and passionate, a nice addition to an uneven program and a bright spot of the biggest night celebrating film and television in Hollywood. But there was one major winner who we didn’t get to see on the televised broadcast and the show was lesser for it: Viola Davis.
Davis won the renowned Cecil B. DeMille award (past winners include Meryl Streep, Oprah, Eddie Murphy, George Clooney, Jane Fonda, and Sidney Poitier, just to name a few) that honors “outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment.” As Vulture notes, only 17 of the 70 Cecil B. DeMille Award honorees have been women; Davis is the second woman of color to win the award after Oprah Winfrey made history in 2018. Davis is easily one of the greatest actors to have ever attempted the medium. She’s an EGOT winner. She’s Viola Thee Davis. So, bestowing this honor on her seemed like a no brainer. When it was announced, it just felt like a confirmation of her illustrious career, a foregone conclusion that culminated from every lip quiver and snot-inducing emotional monologue. Cecil B. DeMille award recipient, Viola Davis. Yeah, that tracks.
In the Golden Globes 82-year history, the award has only been skipped a handful of times (in 1976, 2008, 2022, and 2024) for various reasons but mainly because of strikes and time constraints. This year was the first instance I can remember in which the award was given but not televised during the show’s official broadcast. There are a few reasons the decision to not include Davis accepting this honor was baffling. The break in tradition was strange, considering that in past years, the moment in the show has produced some iconic speeches. When Streep accepted her Cecil B. DeMille award, she used her speech to call out Donald Trump and his administration’s villainization of immigrants. “Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. If you kick ’em all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts,” Streep said in 2017 after listing off many of the nominees in the room who were from various backgrounds. “An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us and let you feel what that feels like… you know, what is Hollywood anyway? It’s just a bunch of people from other places.”
If I waited for a role that was written for me, well-crafted, I wouldn’t be standing up here. So I took it for the money.
viola davis giving the acceptance speech that should have been televised
Last year, I wrote about how the Golden Globes ceremony was frustratingly apolitical. “There is a long history of performers using their platforms at awards ceremonies to uplift social issues, to cause a bit of political commotion, or to try to disrupt the idea that the only point of awards shows is glitz, glamour, and escapism,” I wrote last year when most winners opted out of using their platforms to speak to anything of substance. This year, I was looking forward to Davis’s honor, not just because she’s deserving of all of the praise, accolades, and proverbial flowers that can possibly be bestowed on a performer of her caliber, but because I expected her speech to be all the things Viola Davis usually is: powerful, inspiring, and refreshingly honest. This is the woman who used her Emmys acceptance speech in 2015 to call out the inequities Black women, specifically, face in Hollywood. “Let me tell you something: The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity. You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there,” she said before thanking Shonda Rhimes for “redefin[ing] what it means to be beautiful, to be sexy, to be a leading woman, to be Black.” Finally, she took a moment to acknowledge her fellow Black women in Hollywood: “… to the Taraji P. Hensons, the Kerry Washingtons, the Halle Berrys, the Nicole Beharies, the Meagan Goods, to Gabrielle Union: Thank you for taking us over that line.”
That line — the one that shifts and bends to the whims of white Hollywood executives that I’m assuming Davis was referring to — has never been more clear. A decade after Davis’s Emmys speech and in a post-2020 industry when diversity initiatives are being rolled back and Black women are still severely underrepresented on screen and behind the scenes, it felt especially egregious to deprive us of watching Davis accept this honor. And furthermore, when Davis did grace the Golden Globes stage, she wasn’t even given a standing ovation or a moment for the room to acknowledge the magnitude of the award. It was mentioned via voiceover and Davis acknowledged the honor herself then went about business as usual as she presented the award for Best Actress in a drama film. No one stood. No one took a second to bow down to the greatness of a living legend. I couldn’t help but wonder if they would have done the same for Streep (who actually presented Davis with her award — again, we would have loved to see it!).
The Golden Globes has a long and sorted history of disrespecting Black talent, but I think this oversight was a little more nuanced than simply misogynoir on display. After many controversies over the years, the Globes’ founding organization, the HFPA, has been dismantled and the awarding body has promised to do better when it comes to diversity. The night before the Globes, on Friday, January 3rd, Davis, and the Carol Burnett Award winner Ted Danson, were treated to a special evening in their honor. Both were omitted from Sunday’s broadcast in favor of the Friday event. The Globes defended their decision by stating that they “decided to devote an entire evening to the recipients, with lengthy clips, introductory remarks and acceptance speeches that allowed time to give the artists their due, rather than squeeze them into a 45-second slot on a longer awards show.” My question is: why couldn’t they have done both? I would have also loved to see Danson’s speech, since he’s one of my all-time faves (The Good Place forever) so it was a bad decision to forgo his moment and run a bit of host Nikki Glazer singing about The Pope instead. A white man was slighted as well, so it can’t be that disrespectful, right? And yet, Davis’s slight still hits different (derogatory).
For Viola Davis, being excluded from the televised broadcast might not mean much. She still got a whole night in her honor, Meryl Streep singing her praises, and an award that cements her in the halls of Hollywood history. The award meant so much to her (Variety says she’s won more than 120 awards during her career) she told USA Today that the Cecil B. DeMille Award was the “first award that I was told that I won that made me cry.” The honor itself might be enough for Davis. But for us, the audience, we were robbed of one of those signature, affecting Viola Davis acceptance speeches. And for the audience, it sends a message that of all the years in which you choose to move your highest honor to an untelevised “celebration,” it’s the year in which our most revered and exceptional Black actress is up for the distinction. It’s giving the same energy as Beyoncé being the most winningest artist in the history of the Grammys and yet never winning the coveted Album of the Year.
They say that the only two people you owe anything to is your 6-year-old self and your 80-year-old self… little Viola is squealing.
viola davis giving the acceptance speech that should have been televised
It’s not the same, of course, because Davis did get the honor, but by only putting her speech up on YouTube and not even devoted a proper segment in the broadcast to recognize her, the Golden Globes are sending a message — intentional or not — that her win is less important than her predecessors. Their justification may have been timing, but all I see is our GOAT being deprioritized. Whatever the intention, these are now the optics. And after receiving one of the most coveted honors of her career, Viola Davis deserves better than to be at the center of controversy surrounding the show.
So, instead of dwelling on the show’s ill-advised decision, I want to end by highlighting some of my favorite moments of the speech Davis did give — off the cuff, for 16 minutes — because it’s, as expected, packed with wisdom and dripping with nuggets of pure gold. Davis started the speech by speaking of her humble beginnings, growing up in poverty in Rhode Island. “I was born into a life that just simply did not make sense. I didn’t fit in. I was born into abject poverty. I was mischievous. I was imaginative,” she said. “I was rambunctious. I was poor going up in a house with alcoholism and infested with rats everywhere… And on top of all that, all anyone ever said was that I wasn’t pretty. By the way, what the hell is pretty?,” she asked, a question many Black girls have asked at some point in our lives. “I wasn’t pretty. I just wanted be somebody.”
Davis continued by speaking to her audacity to dream, to be curious and creative in spite of her conditions. “And you know what my magic was? That I could teleport. That I can take myself out of this worthless world and relieve myself of it at times… I was curious and that’s how I started my journey. And I had enough curiosity to know not only could I perform magic and have these people, but what could they give me? What could I find? And all of these lives that could somehow rain down those gold nuggets and give to me to make my life make sense.”
Almost every line of Davis’s speech is worthy of its own telecast. Can you win an Oscar for accepting another award? The gems continued when Davis spoke of the financial struggles of her career. She admitted she “took a lot of jobs because of the money” and noted that she does not “believe that poverty is really the answer to craft,” nor is there “any nobility in poverty.” She took those jobs out of necessity: “Because sometimes for a dark-skinned Black woman with a wide nose and big lips, that’s all there is out there,” she said. “If I waited for a role that was written for me, well-crafted, I wouldn’t be standing up here. So I took it for the money.”
What Viola Davis has done in Hollywood – the most nominated Black actress ever — is no small feat. And she did it all in the face of an industry that makes it extremely difficult for Black women to break through the barricades it has put up, purposely and perpetually. She overcame, she overachieved, and now she’s reaping the rewards of that hard work. Inspiring isn’t a big enough word. Neither is excellent. In a world that reveres Black excellence over Black humanity, Viola Davis is an easy beacon to reinforce that mindset. But to lump her in with the antiquated notion that you can only be extraordinary to be worthy if you are Black and a woman would be to negate Davis’s evolution, and to ignore the flaws she consistently shows us onscreen, the whole Black women she gives us, some who are not excellent at all, but her portrayals push us forward in a way perfection never could.
The closing moments of Davis’s speech are what will stay with me forever. “They say that the only two people you owe anything to is your 6-year-old self and your 80-year-old self,” she said. “Six-year-old Viola, sometimes I have to rely on [her] to give me perspective, even in this moment… otherwise, it’s too big for me to imagine going from bedwetting and poverty and despair and wrongness to this. And little Viola is squealing.” And then Davis evoked an image that would make even the toughest person well up with tears. “She’s standing behind me now and she’s pulling on my dress and she’s wearing the same red rubber boots as she wore rain or shine because they made her feel pretty. She’s squealing and she’s saying one thing. She says, ‘Make them hear this.’ And what she’s whispering is, ‘I told you I was a magician.’”
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This article was originally published on refinery29.com.