New Delhi: US television network NBC has announced that it will drop its broadcast of the Golden Globes ceremony in 2022. The decision comes after the Hollywood backlash over the lack of diversity and the ethics of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), whose members vote on the annual awards for film and television.
It is for the first time since 1996 that NBC has decided not to broadcast the awards.
Actor Tom Cruise joined a revolt led by a host of streaming platforms and top studios, and urged others to join the call for action. The Mission Impossible star also returned the three awards he won for his roles in the movies Jerry Maguire, Magnolia and Born on the Fourth of July to register his protest, Variety magazine reported on Tuesday.
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) has been facing severe allegations of corruption and impropriety, and lack of diversity. The members have also been accused of making sexist and racist remarks
Streaming giants Netflix, Amazon Studios, WarnerMedia and several top PR companies have earlier said they would no longer work with the HFPA unless it made far-reaching changes.
WarnerMedia, which includes cable channel HBO and movie studio Warner Brothers, had even written to HFPA expressing concerns over "racially insensitive, sexist and homophobic questions" at press conferences and events during the nominations and awards process.
In wake of the criticism, the HFPA had agreed to make some changes over the next year, which were initially welcomed by NBC. But later, the network said it would wait to see if the reforms worked.
"Change of this magnitude takes time and work, and we feel strongly that the HFPA needs time to do it right. As such, NBC will not air the 2022 Golden Globes. Assuming the organisation executes on its plan, we are hopeful we will be in a position to air the show in January 2023," NBC said in a statement, Reuters reported on Tuesday.
Soon after the announcement, the HFPA said it is implementing "transformational change" on priority and also reiterated that by August 2021, it would approve a new code of conduct and provide diversity and sexual harassment training among other steps.
The annual Golden Globes ceremony has become one of the biggest Hollywood awards shows in the run-up to the Oscars. But it has been under close scrutiny following an investigation published in February by the Los Angeles Times that showed the group of 87 journalists had no Black members. The association has faced further criticism for this year’s slate of nominations, which did not include several Black-led Oscar contenders such as Da 5 Bloods, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Judas and the Black Messiah in the nominees for the group’s top award.
