00:00I love you all, but you'll have to forgive me.
00:03I've lost my voice in screaming and lamentation this weekend.
00:09And I have lost my mind sometime earlier this year, so I have to read.
00:21Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press.
00:24Just to pick up on what Hugh Laurie said,
00:28you and all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now.
00:37Think about it.
00:39Hollywood, foreigners, and the press.
00:46But who are we?
00:48And, you know, what is Hollywood anyway?
00:51It's just a bunch of people from other places.
00:52I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey.
00:57Viola was born in a sharecropper's cabin in South Carolina.
01:01Came up in Central Falls, Rhode Island.
01:05Sarah Paulson was born in Florida, raised by a single mom in Brooklyn.
01:10Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids from Ohio.
01:16Amy Adams was born in Vincenzo, Veneto, Italy.
01:20And Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem.
01:22Where are their birth certificates?
01:29And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in London, no, in Ireland, I do believe.
01:40And she's here nominated for playing a small-town girl from Virginia.
01:45Ryan Gosling, like all the nicest people, is Canadian.
01:54And Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, and is here for playing an Indian raised in Tasmania.
02:01So, Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners.
02:06And if we kick them all out, you'll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are
02:12not the arts.
02:27They gave me three seconds to say this.
02:29So, an actor's only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us and let you
02:37feel what that feels like.
02:38And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that.
02:44Breathtaking, compassionate work.
02:46But there was one performance this year that stunned me.
02:50It sank its hooks in my heart.
02:52Not because it was good.
02:55There was nothing good about it.
02:58But it was effective and it did its job.
03:00It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth.
03:05It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a
03:14disabled reporter.
03:16Someone he outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back.
03:25It kind of broke my heart when I saw it.
03:29And I still can't get it out of my head because it wasn't in a movie.
03:31It was real life.
03:34And this instinct to humiliate, when it's modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful.
03:44It filters down into everybody's life because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.
03:53Disrespect invites disrespect.
03:55Violence incites violence.
03:59When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.
04:04Okay.
04:05Go up with that thing.
04:07Okay.
04:08This brings me to the press.
04:10We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call them on the carpet for every outrage.
04:27That's why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in our constitution.
04:33So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood foreign press and all of us in our community to join
04:41me in supporting the committee to protect journalists.
04:45Because we're going to need them going forward.
04:47And they'll need us to safeguard the truth.
04:52One more thing.
04:58Once, when I was standing around on the set one day, whining about something, you know, we were going to
05:05work through supper or the long hours or whatever,
05:07Tommy Lee Jones said to me, isn't it such a privilege, Meryl, just to be an actor?
05:17Yeah, it is.
05:18And we have to remind each other of the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy.
05:25We should all be very proud of the work.
05:28Hollywood honors here tonight.
05:34As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia said to me once, take your broken heart, make it into art.
