Catt Sadler did not at all expect to be part of the 2018 Golden Globes red carpet. The former E! host had quit the network the previous December, after hearing her male co-host was allegedly making nearly twice her salary. As her former co-workers gathered outside the Beverly Hilton that night, Sadler was at home in her pajamas. So when Debra Messing—wearing black, like nearly every woman on the red carpet, to support intersectional gender parity and protest the kind of equal-pay issues that had led Sadler to leave—told Giuliana Rancic, “I miss Catt Sadler, and we stand with her,” Sadler was genuinely in awe.
“Disbelief. Complete and utter shock,” she says. “And honestly, discomfort.”
“I had been with that network for more than a decade, had been on those carpets working during awards season,” Sadler says. “The on-air talent were my friends. The crew was like family. I know it was an excruciatingly hard day for them. The people on the ground working weren’t the problem. At the same time, I was so humbled by these extraordinary women coming to my defense. I knew at that moment this issue was much bigger than my singular story.”
As we continue through another awards season, it’s fascinating to look back at what Sadler’s Golden Globes 2018 night portended then—and might yet for the years to come. In its near-century as a showcase for Hollywood stars, and even in its more recent incarnation as a media free-for-all, the red carpet has never served as stage for as much real-life conflict as it did in the last year. Under normal circumstances, the awards-show carpet is a pure distillation of the entertainment industry’s most superficial impulses, practically designed to thwart sober reflection and moments of self-awareness.
The last year, though, has tested the form. The New York Times and New Yorker exposés on Harvey Weinstein ran in October 2017; in the months that followed, more reporters spoke with more victims, who named their own alleged abusers, in Hollywood and beyond. By the time of the Globes in early January, the first major awards show of the year, no one seemed in the mood for the customary grand entrance. Time’s Up, launched on New Year’s Day, less than a week before the awards, offered one solution: they worked with attendees to wear black, to show their objection to systemic harassment and inequality in Hollywood and blue-collar workplaces nationwide. Several actresses brought gender-equality activists as dates, like Tarana Burke, who had created Me Too a decade prior and joined Michelle Williams at the Globes. The cultural momentum was there, and the message was clear and unified: sexual harassment and exploitation in this industry and others would no longer be tolerated.
While #MeToo provided a catalyst, in truth the red carpet had been evolving before its full-on transformation post-Weinstein. The Reese Witherspoon-backed #AskHerMore campaign began in 2014, and succeeded in getting the Rancics and Seacrests of the world to ask women questions beyond fashion. In 2014 Elisabeth Moss raised what turned out to be a highly symbolic middle finger to Mani Cam, E!’s divisive invention that provided its home audience with a tortuously close shot of the stars’ nail polish. It was retired a year later. Fashion Police, E!’s after-the-ceremony digestif, which had adopted the brassy, dishy tone of lead anchor Joan Rivers as its house voice, pivoted to a gentler point of view after she died, in 2014. It was canceled in 2017, before the next awards season started in earnest. The Trump era just brought a sense of urgency to the whole affair, as it did elsewhere. With the constant creep of Muslim bans (a hot topic at the Oscars ceremony in 2017), the ongoing border crisis, and Trump’s own sexual-assault allegations (which he, too, denies), each red carpet since November 2016 had felt like an opportunity to air righteous rage and for catharsis. It was probably impossible to keep that energy going, or to forever reconcile the cognitive dissonance of putting on lavish formal wear to speak truth to power.
After the all-black Golden Globes came the BAFTAs, in London, where the black dress code prevailed. At the Oscars, pins for Time’s Up and for the prevention of gun violence (the Parkland shootings had happened weeks earlier) flooded the carpet; in June, A.C.L.U. ribbons sat next to Time’s Up pins at the Tony Awards in New York. Then came summer vacations and hiatuses, and by the time the Emmys came back around in September, political ribbons and activists-as-dates were out; cheery questions about “inspiration” and outfits were back in.
Red-carpet activism is certainly not over—lapel ribbons and political statements will linger as long as there are cameras and celebrities have opinions. But the Emmys seemed to suggest that the fever pitch of last year’s awards season had, perhaps inevitably, cooled, even as protest-worthy news continued. Shortly before the Emmys red carpet began, Time’s Up announced in an e-mail that some Emmys attendees might wear buttons that read “I Believe Christine Blasey Ford” and “I Still Believe Anita Hill” (Ford had come forward as Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser just a day before). The turnaround time might have simply been too fast; the buttons didn’t take over the Emmys red carpet, even on several of the stars who had worn all black at the Globes just eight months earlier.
Marc Malkin, of Variety, included advocacy questions to the likes of Issa Rae and Jenifer Lewis, an outlier in head-to-toe Nike in support of Colin Kaepernick. Most red-carpet telecasts, meanwhile, depicted an event that was essentially a glamorous office party, where almost everyone was talking about work. Malkin gets it. He covered red carpets with E! for more than a decade, and for other lifestyle outlets as well. “Sometimes you just want to breathe, and put on a pretty dress or a tux, and walk down the red carpet, and wave to the fans. And there’s nothing wrong with that. You’ve got to have balance in your life,” he said.
For the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, which is housed and administered by the National Women’s Law Center Fund and raised $22 million in its first nine months of existence, the Golden Globes “blackout” was an effective introduction—but perhaps a limiting one. “People see the organization as one that has a lot of well-known actresses who are involved with it,” says Nithya Raman, who founded and ran an initiative in India to advocate for, and with, those living in slum and informal settlements before recently being named the executive director of Time’s Up Entertainment. “That perception is not wrong. . . . It’s not a wrong face, it’s just part of the work and the world that we’ve been involved with.”
Another person close to Time’s Up added that the organization was never meant to be a “red-carpet campaign.” “One of our goals that we set out to do at the Golden Globes was make the loudest noise,” they said. “We just don’t want people to think that if it’s not at the Globes, if you’re not seeing it on the Grammys or the Emmys or what have you, that it’s losing steam, because there’s people around this country and around the world that are doing really important things outside of entertainment. . . . People look at that and are like, ‘Are we losing steam?’ It’s like, ‘No, we’re just getting started.’ ”
As Sadler put it, the Golden Globes were extraordinary because of the number of people involved. “There’s no ignoring that much force behind a message,” she said. But that red-carpet blackout was probably a one-time event, even as #MeToo-inspired action continues in and out of Hollywood. The work goes on, but the step-and-repeat, for now, is not the right place to show it. “I think the intention is commendable, but as someone who has been on both sides of the microphone, I think there’s a limited amount of progress that can be made for causes on a carpet,” Sadler says. “Awareness is valuable, but real change doesn’t happen here alone.”
