Why did Tom Cruise return his Golden Globes?
Tom Cruise may be Hollywood’s last true movie star. If you put aside the various members of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he is the highest-grossing actor of all time, thanks to the Mission: Impossible franchise and Top Gun: Maverick. According to Stephen Spielberg, he’s singlehandedly responsible for saving the film industry from its post-pandemic downward spiral. In other words, he’s got a solid track record.
While raking in box office returns over the decades, Cruise has also found time to star in some more awardsy movies like Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.
He has been handsomely awarded (and nominated) for his status as Hollywood’s preeminent, age-defying, stunt-smashing star. He’s earned four Oscar nominations – for acting in Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire, and Magnolia, and for producing Top Gun: Maverick – and seven Golden Globe nominations.
The latter distinctions became the topic of some controversy in 2021 when he handed back all three Globes he’d won for Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire, and Magnolia.
So, why’d he do it?
Although the Golden Globes are often thought of as the funner, more relaxed version of the Oscars, the people who vote for them are a far cry from the industry artists who vote for the Academy Awards. The Globes are voted on by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a group of people who, in 2021, had only 87 members that were neither diverse nor particularly ethical.
Following the 2020 murder of George Floyd and the reckoning with racial inequality that followed, the HFPA became an easy target when it was revealed that it had no Black members. It was also accused of corruption and improperhandling of funds, as well as predatory behaviour. Scarlett Johansson came forward to condemn the organisation as a relic of Harvey Weinstein’s Hollywood, saying (via CNN) that members of the group often asked questions at press conferences that were so sexist they “bordered on sexual harassment.”
In an earlier, more memorable quote, Gary Oldman referred to the organisation as “90 nobodies having a wank” and suggested a boycott of the “silly game” their awards represented. He did, however, attend to pick up his award forDarkest Hour four years later.
Less than an hour after NBC announced that it would not be airing the Golden Globes in 2022, Cruise returned all three of his awards without public comment.
What movie “robbed” Tom Cruise of an Oscar?
Even though the Globes are pretty universally considered to be inferior to the Oscars, it is surprising that a star of Cruise’s stature has never gotten hold of one of those little gold men. You could argue over which film he should have won for (Tropic Thunder, obviously), but Oliver Stone is crystal clear about it.
Stone directed Cruise in his first Oscar-nominated performance as anti-war activist Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July, and believed that he deserved the award more than anyone. The star had stiff competition from Kenneth Branagh in Henry V, Morgan Freeman in Driving Miss Daisy, Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, and Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot. Day-Lewis took home the hardware that evening, but Stone was adamant that Cruise had been swindled.
The swindler? Harvey Weinstein. “I think he robbed Cruise of the Oscar, frankly,” Stone said, pointing to the aggressive awards campaigning for which the sexual predator and super producer was infamous. There’s no denying Weinstein’s tactics, but it’s also tough to argue that Day-Lewis didn’t deserve the award that year, or any year that he was nominated for an Oscar, for that matter.
