Director Melina Matsoukas didn’t bother to set her alarm for the Golden Globes announcement Monday. When she woke up on Dec. 9 to the news that her movie, “Queen & Slim,” a powerful drama about a young black couple forced to go on the run after a fatal encounter with a racist cop, hadn’t received a single nomination, she wasn’t surprised.
She’d already been warned by her team that the membership of Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., comprised of about 90 international journalists who vote on the Golden Globes, had skipped multiple screenings of “Queen & Slim” that had been set for them.
“We held three screenings for the HFPA and almost no members attended,” Matsoukas told Variety. “For me, it’s reflective of their voting body. It’s not reflective of the society in which we live in or the industry as it stands today. They don’t value the stories that represent all of us, and those stories are so often disregarded and discredited, as are their filmmakers.”
She added: “It’s extremely discouraging. It’s extremely infuriating. And it just represents an archaic system that is full of people who don’t value us.”
“Queen & Slim,” written and produced by Lena Waithe, stars Daniel Kaluuya (the Oscar-nominated actor from “Get Out”) and Jodie Turner-Smith. The film has grossed nearly $30 million at the domestic box office, outperforming analysts’ expectations.
A representative for the HPFA disputes the claim that members didn’t watch the film. All voters had been sent screeners and could have seen it at home. “The HFPA maintains that ‘Queen & Slim’ was in the conversation amongst the membership,” the organization told Variety in a statement.
Universal Pictures, which distributed the movie, declined to comment.
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