Golden Globes voters refused to watch 'Queen & Slim,' insists its director

Queen & Slim director Melina Matsoukas has attacked the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, insisting that most of its members, who vote for the Golden Globes, didn’t attend screenings for the romantic drama.

“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.”

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“They don’t value the stories that represent all of us, and those stories are so often disregarded and discredited, as are their filmmakers. 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.”

The Golden Globe nominations have been widely criticised after no women were nominated in the Best Director and Best Screenplay categories.

That’s despite the fact that Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart, Lorene Sacfaria’s Hustlers, Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day In The Neighbourhood, and Alma Har’el’s Honey Boy, to name but a few, have all been critically acclaimed.

In response to Matsoukas comments, representative for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association insisted that all of its voters had been sent over 60,000 individual screeners that they could watch at home.

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Matsoukas also revealed that at a fundraiser earlier this year one HPFA member even used an “archaic term” during a pitch, which she found “quite offensive and disrespectful.”

Queen & Slim, which stars Oscar-nominee Daniel Kaluuya and up and coming actress Jodie Turner-Smith as two African Americans who have to go on the run after killing a police officer in self-defense, will be released in the UK on January 31, 2020.