Joker picked up one of the major gongs in the award season calendar last night when Joaquin Phoenix won Best Actor In A Motion Picture – Drama at the Golden Globes. In what may well be an omen for the upcoming Academy Awards, Once Upon a Time In Hollywood and 1917 snagged the biggest awards, but it’d have been remiss of them to overlook Phoenix’s truly astonishing performance as Arthur Fleck/Joker.
But even as fans were celebrating Phoenix’s success, there was also some anger. That’s because overzealous censors bleeped out pretty much all of his acceptance speech. Now, he did swear quite a bit, which is a no-no on network primetime TV. But the amount of beeping meant not only that you couldn’t hear him say fu*k, but you couldn’t understand a lot of what he was saying at all. Even beyond the swearing, some of his comments on climate change were censored, which feels a bit politically cowardly.
Fortunately, an uncensored version of his speech has now surfaced and you can check it out below:
The other half of the speech #JoaquinPhoenix ❤️ #Golden pic.twitter.com/XPlGioriig
— esin☽ (@thouflowergirl) January 6, 2020
As far as these sorts of things go, it’s a pretty good acceptance speech. Like most of you, my skin instinctively crawls when you hear an A-list millionaire lecturing others about environmentalism. But hey, at least he’s directing his criticism at his fellow celebrities for using private jets while the world burns. In addition, I really liked his acknowledgement of everyone secretly knowing that this isn’t really a competition between actors.
I also enjoyed his shout-out to being intimidated by Christian Bale even though they “share the same agent.” Bale and clowns have a rocky history on and off-screen, so if I were Joaquin, I’d avoid the famously tempestuous actor as well.
In the meantime, both Joker and Phoenix will be hoping to recreate this success in a month’s time for the Academy Awards. Fingers crossed!
