During this annual awards season in Hollywood, it’s great to join in the celebration of the extraordinary gifts and talents of so many actors, directors, writers, producers, and cinematographers who grace us through the mediums of film, television, and the stage. The awards ceremonies are a perennial reminder of the industry’s capacity to translate aspects of the human experience into cinematic or dramatic forms that communicate to us in very unique and powerful ways. The range of themes, stories, and plots create a theatrical landscape that resonates with hopes and aspirations that exceed most of our imaginations. These artistic formats consistently give us the space to look beyond what’s in front of us toward creative possibilities and realities. We desperately need the comedies to make us laugh so that we don’t get overly bogged down with our daily routines. The action, adventure, and science fiction pieces provoke us to levels of suspense and curiosity like nothing else in life, and the documentaries tell us stories that are often ignored or forgotten. Most of us would take ourselves much too seriously were it not for the ability to sit in a movie theater, in front of a television or stage production and laugh, cry, or imagine for a while about something other than ourselves or our immediate circumstances.

The entertainment industry always seems to display its abiding sense of connectedness to the ebb and flow of everyday life through their work and philanthropy. In fact, Hollywood regularly uses its platforms and visibility to demonstrate a social conscience unparalleled by many industries. Although many earn sums of money per project that the average person may not earn in a lifetime, a large number of the players in the industry consistently remind us of their social awareness and political astuteness. The challenge for many entertainers who wear their politics on their sleeves is that they can appear as hypocrites at times. Which is to say, while many of these multimillionaire actors criticize executives and companies for enormous profits and earnings, the actors fail to reconcile the realities that pretty much every film studio and production company rely on private equity firms, hedge funds, and other large financial institutions to provide the capital and investors for the projects, films, and shows they get paid to do. That said, the beauty of our free market system of capitalism is that not only do we all have opportunities to get and increase our wealth, but we also get to choose whether we share our wealth in ways that enhance the lives and conditions of those around us. In Hollywood, we know that there are countless examples of persons who donate large amounts to their own foundations, to longstanding global initiatives which they champion, and during times of natural disasters and economic crises domestically and abroad.