Oprah Winfrey’s controversial civil rights drama “Selma” and the now-discredited Lena Dunham were the big losers at last night’s Golden Globe awards. Despite the fact both earned more than one nomination in big categories, except for “Selma’s” Best Original Song win, both went home empty handed.
“Selma” had been nominated in three major categories: Best Drama, Best Actor (David Oyelwo), and Best Director (Ana DuVarney). It lost in all three to “Boyhood,” Eddie Redmayne (“The Theory of Everything”), and Richard Linklater (“Boyhood”), respectively.
The Hollywood Reporter notes that the “film’s awards prospects may have been hurt by questions about its historical accuracy.”
Eyewitness testimony and transcripts of phone conversations between President Lyndon Johnson and Selma March organizer Dr. Martin Luther King go a long way towards proving that “Selma’s” depiction of Johnson is not only inaccurate but outright defamatory.
“Selma” depicts the former President as a racist villain who went so far as to use the F.B.I. to blackmail King. The truth is that he encouraged King and worked as a not-so-silent partner to ensure the march in Selma would lead to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Winfrey faced similar criticisms over historical accuracy last year with another political race-drama, “The Butler.”
Dunham’s HBO series “Girls” was nominated for Best Comedy Series and Dunham herself was nominated for Best Actress In a Comedy Series. She lost to “Transparent” and Gina Rodriguez (“Jane the Virgin”), respectively.
In the run up to the Golden Globes, Lena Dunham dealt with a very special kind of historical accuracy scandal, this one having to do with her own memoir. After claiming in her non-fiction memoir that she had been raped in college by a campus Republican named Barry, an in-depth Breitbart News investigation revealed that nothing she wrote about her alleged rapist could be verified.
Moreover, Breitbart News discovered that for nearly two months Dunham and her publisher Random House knowingly allowed an innocent family man (we identified as Barry One) to live under a cloud of suspicion as her rapist.
After the publication of our investigation and the threat of a lawsuit from Barry One’s attorney Aaron Minc, Random House agreed to ensure future runs of the memoir made clear to readers that Dunham had fabricated certain details about her rapist.
Dunham eventually apologized to Barry One and claimed that it was a “surreal coincidence” that the 7 completely unnecessary (to her story of being raped) details identifying her rapist led directly to an outspoken conservative she attended college with.
The left-wing site Gawker would later report that Dunham’s alleged rapist is a Democrat, not a Republican.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC