Exactly 12 years ago, John Travolta had one of the most famous award show moments of the Obama era. Trying to pronounce the name of the (wih-cked-ly) talented Idina Menzel, the Oscar presenter famously bungled the name into something resembling Adele Dazeem. A million memes broke out. (Try watching it even now without laughing; you can’t.)On Sunday Billie Eilish had one of the most famous award show moments of the still-burgeoning Trump II era. Accepting song of the year at the Grammys, she said, among other coyly delivered broadsides, “Fuck ICE, “no one is illegal on stolen land” and “I feel like we just need to keep fighting.” A tense congressional hearing broke out.

The moment on Tuesday became fodder for Ted Cruz to go after Ted Sarandos at an ostensible Netflix-WB antitrust hearing. (Try watching it even now without sighing; you can’t.)All sorts of politics are at play here. For one thing, Cruz’s comment is not only beside the point but in bad faith. The singer “promptly went back to her $14 million mansion, and somehow that stolen land she wasn’t concerned about,” the senator said. But Eilish’s point of course wasn’t that we should all move out of our homes — it’s that knowing our history would temper our aggressive attitude toward newer arrivals. Cruz is smart enough to know that. But he’s also smart enough not to pass up a point-scoring opportunity when he sees it.

But he’s also even smarter than that. He knows that comments like his can have a chilling effect on future political statements. Sarandos surely didn’t run back and rebuke Eilish (her doc is with Apple, for one thing). But he might, with a massive merger pending in front of a machete-bearing Trump administration, think twice about making any creative decisions that could lead to more tense moments. Or sentiment could simply trickle down in his company(or David Zaslav’s) that has talent avoiding similar statements at future shows. Who wants to get the boss in trouble?Fortunately at least for Sarandos, Trump loathes Cruz. This is what Hollywood executive strategy looks like in 2026 — hope the Republicans who hate you aren’t loved by the Republicans who can bring the hammer down on you. As the classic line from Overboard goes, “it’s a helluva day at sea, sir.”This is also what award show speeches look like now. Not that long ago a venue mainly for heartfelt moments or funny memes — Dazeem somehow feels like 2004, not 2014 — they have become in the Trump era a genre all their own. Meryl Streep gave her moving and cleverly unnamed anti-Trump speech at the 2017 Golden Globes just before he took office (watch that again now) and the next year Robert DeNiro offered up his ground-shaking “It’s no longer down with Trump, it’s fuck Trump,” at the Tony Awards. Award speeches in the MAGA age have become a place to make statements, to normalize a zeitgeist, to flood the zone with so many calls for sympathy and equality Ted Cruz is drowning in them.Or at least they did. The Grammy winners surely will double down. The anti-ICE message has been echoed by artists from Bad Bunny to Bruce Springsteen to Billie Joe Armstrong, with two of the three likely now about to get even more political at the Super Bowl. But film and television stars lately have been contorting themselves to say less. Watching the Golden Globes last month you almost felt like winners — just four days after the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis — were painfully going out of their way to avoid political comments. At best we got Jean Smart, who, still tiptoeing, said “Let’s all do the right thing” and then followed it up backstage by adding “I have mixed feelings about getting political or making social commentary at an awards event … we’ve gotten to a point now that is so so important that everybody wakes up and opens their eyes and is brave and calm but at the same time try to be active if you have to or if you want to reach out to your representatives and I would say that to everybody whatever side of the aisle you’re on.” Fuck ICE it was not.No Hollywood celebrity owes any cause anything; if we’re going to decry the false piety of shut-up-and-sing we should also be as sensitive to its opposite, speak-up-or-shut-up. And yes, music stars have a lot more shots at, and knack for, rousing a large audience. Still, musicians work for giant corporations too, and when Billie and Bruce and Bad Bunny and so many others say “Fuck ICE” without fear of repercussion, setting a tone for both the show and an America in a time of moral violation, it makes you wonder why movie stars as a group can’t do the same. 

Sure, personal publicists won’t like the fallout, but then isn’t that why they get paid? Studio executives will worry about the box office backlash, but if your product is really so fragile that one awards speech could kill it then maybe the problem isn’t the award speech. You got the sense watching the Globes more than a few winners would like to go back to the Adele Dazeem era, somehow forgetting that before that time came Michael Moore and Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda and Sean Penn, and if a Gen Z singer could pull us back to it, maybe they could too.Also, movie stars might do well to remember that, post-Pretti and post-Good, they finally have the American public on their side. Last year’s fig leaf of a “mandate” has frittered away with the red-carpet fashions.There’s an irony in some of these speeches becoming more political as the shows are watched less. Or perhaps the two are related; without the pretense of speaking to 80 million people, winners feel they might as well let the political outrage fly. A Cruz-ian sort would say these call-outs are the flailing of a shrinking entertainment elite, but the first explanation tracks harder: A smaller audience makes you double down on what you believe. Ted Cruz certainly doesn’t care about pleasing everyone, and Billie Eilish and a whole bunch of musicians now clearly don’t either. Hollywood stars would do well to worry less about bungling the teleprompter and more about being true to their heart.