Hollywood accusers named 'Entertainer of the Year' by the Associated Press
The biggest story in entertainment this year wasn't just one story. It was hundreds, thousands, millions of different stories connected by a single horrifying thread.
It seems only appropriate, then, that the Associated Press' Entertainer of the Year honor should go to all the brave souls behind all those stories.
The prize, which is voted on by "members of the cooperative and AP entertainment reporters," has gone this year to Hollywood accusers – all the people who stepped up to share their stories of being harassed, assaulted, and abused in Hollywood.
The group overlaps with the "silence breakers," who were collectively named Time's Person of the Year earlier this month.
Though the Entertainer of the Year prize has typically gone to individual artists (Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jennifer Lawrence, and Taylor Swift are among the previous recipients), the organization has occasionally rewarded other entities. Frozen was the winner in 2014; in 2015, it was Star Wars.
Others who got votes this year included Jimmy Kimmel, Gal Gadot, and Kendrick Lamar.
While this year's selection may not be particularly surprising, they're certainly deserving. The wave of sexual misconduct allegations began in October, with a pair of bombshell reports about producer Harvey Weinstein – but has since snowballed into something much, much bigger.
More women and men came forward, with more stories about still more predators. What started out looking like a Weinstein problem pretty quickly revealed itself as an industrywide disease.
It wasn't that these stories were new. It was that for the first time in a long time, it felt like people were listening.
Actually, make that worldwide. As the #MeToo movement caught on, it spread in all directions – to music, to dining, to sports, to publishing, to journalism, to politics, to practically any industry you could think of.
It wasn't that these stories were new. Most of them had been whispered about for years. It was that for the first time in a long time, it felt like people were listening and taking them seriously. Real consequences followed in many, though not all of the cases. Prominent figures were kicked out of organizations, fired from jobs, dropped by clients, and in one notorious case, digitally erased from a movie.
And it's still going. Just this week, comedian T.J. Miller was accused of sexually assaulting a college classmate and sexually harassing multiple colleagues.
It's hard to argue with the impact these stories have had on the entertainment industry, and really the world at large, this year – hence, why these accusers are winning honors like "Time Person of the Year" and "AP Entertainer of the Year."
The question now, however, is where we go from here. It's all well and good to celebrate these truth-tellers on magazine covers and in news reports. But honors don't mean a whole lot if there isn't real change backing it up.
This needs to be the end of the first chapter – not the end of the entire story.
