A big question going into the 74th Golden Globe Awards on Sunday night was how political the night was going to be. With Jimmy Fallon as host and Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration less than two weeks away, chances were very good the night could get preachy very quickly.

And then Meryl Streep stepped up to the podium — and erased all doubt.

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The actress was there to receive a lifetime achievement award. That was pretty much forgotten. Instead, she continued a line of thought begun a little earlier in the evening by actor Hugh Laurie. She said the room was filled with the most “vilified” segments of American society — Hollywood, foreigners, and the press.

She took digs at President-Elect Trump by pointing out the varied cultural backgrounds of everyone in the room and saying Hollywood was full of “outsiders and foreigners.” “If you kick them all out, you’ll have nothing but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts,” she said.

Surprisingly — but maybe not — the leftist actress continued to keep the focus away from her career and the specific award in hand, and instead directed her comments toward Trump. She said she was “stunned” by one performance from 2016, and of course it belonged to the president-elect. After bringing up a July 2016 speech in which Trump was accused of physically mocking a disabled reporter, Streep said the moment “kind of broke my heart.”

She added, “I couldn’t get it out of my head, and this wasn’t in a movie. It was real life.” Trump claimed at the time he was not mocking the reporter, and others put forth that his movements had been used at previous rallies. Streep finished her speech — no, her rant — by calling on the press to keep the upcoming administration in check. She encouraged fellow celebrities to support the Committee to Protect Journalists. She told the press it was their job to call out “outrages” from the next president. “We need a principled press to hold everyone accountable,” she said — something that clearly has not been done for the last eight years.

It was highly disconcerting to see politics and political preaching so aggressively become the focus of a night meant to celebrate art and its unifying nature.

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The night, up until that point, had been a mixed bag, politics wise. While some celebrities had more generic messages of hope and artistic triumph, others had Trump on their minds as well.

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Hugh Laurie, who won the Globe for Best Actor in a Miniseries or TV Movie for “The Night Manager,” referred to the night as the “last-ever Golden Globes.” “I don’t mean to be gloomy,” he said before saying the Hollywood Foreign Press — the group behind the Globes — were three words that likely would not get friendly treatment under President Trump. Though, he said, “to some Republicans, word association is probably a little sketchy.”

The host of the night, Fallon, referred to the Globes as “one of the few places left where America still honors the popular vote,” which earned laughs but a few groans as well. Fallon also joked about Russian President Vladimir Putin being one of the vote counters, and the title character from “Florence Foster Jenkins” — the true story of a very obviously awful opera singer pursuing her dreams — turning down the Trump inauguration.

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When Fallon joked that people would see what would happen if King Joffrey lived — an infamously torturous and villainous “Game of Thrones” character — when Trump took office, the joke was met with mostly silence; many people were likely through with the political jabs by then. The host was mostly radio silent the rest of the evening.

Related: Streep Plays Moms in Movies but Disses Real Ones in Rant

Oh, and by the way, Mandy Moore’s plunging neckline was absurdly revealing (as were those of other actresses) — and “La La Land” won the award for Best Motion Picture-Musical or Comedy.