Mr. Fallon handled his technical foul-up much better than the diva. But he didn’t make much of it either, and that summed up the night. He wasn’t bad; this year just didn’t seem like his cultural moment. You had to wonder what last year’s host, the vitriolic Ricky Gervais, might have done, or Mr. Fallon’s other predecessors Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, who made acerbic jokes in good fun.

Entertainers can make an audience forget the turbulent times with a tour de force performance. (See Steve Carell and Kristen Wiig, who did a brilliant bit about their first visits to the movies going horribly wrong — someone might want to call their agents and lock them down to host next year.) They can make art out of troubles. (See many of the night’s winners, such as the race-and-gender-conscious “The People v. O. J. Simpson.”)

Or they can lay it between the lines. Hugh Laurie seemed to compare his character in “The Night Manager” to the president-elect: “I accept this award on behalf of psychopathic billionaires everywhere.”

It was Meryl Streep, receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Award, who repudiated Mr. Trump, for a “performance” during the campaign in which he mocked a disabled reporter. “It sank its hooks in my heart,” she said. Call me biased (that reporter is a colleague at The Times), but it was as passionate and devastating as any scripted clip played that night.

Ms. Streep also said that without Hollywood’s performers from around the world, “you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.” Did that persuade anyone for whom those non-arts are entertainment? There is a school of thought that it does nobody good for celebrities to deliver political diatribes, coded or not, on a night that celebrates the fortune of the fortunate.