Natalie Portman’s Creative “Woke” Woody Allen Spin

Since pretty much every actor and actress in Hollywood has kissed the ring slipped onto the crepey blotched hand of Woody Allen over the six decades that he has been directing five good movies and three-hundred terrible ones, pretty much every actor or actress in Hollywood must face questioning regarding his sexual misconduct because this is 2018 and we want to hear these things. Natalie Portman starred in one of those memorable Allen classics, Everyone Says I Love You, in 1996. When interrogated about her involvement with a sex offender in a recent interview with Buzzbottomfeeder pimping her new flick Annihilation, Portman put every lawyer from every courtroom procedural ever to shame by flipping the script with the calculation and litigiousness that only the owner of a fake degree from Harvard could:

I don’t think that’s what the conversation should be about. I think it should be about: Why didn’t Elaine May make a movie every year? Why didn’t Nora Ephron make a movie every year? Where’s the female version of Bill Cosby? Why don’t we see any Asian women in films? There’s so much art that’s being lost by not giving opportunities to women and people of color. Let’s not talk about what man’s career is over. Let’s talk about the vast art trove we’ve lost by not giving women, people of color, people with disabilities, and the LGBTQ+ community opportunities — let’s talk about that loss for all of us in art. Let’s talk about that huge hole in our culture. I don’t want talk about “Isn’t it sad that this person who’s made 500 movies can’t make movies anymore?” That’s not for me to decide. And it’s also not what I’m upset about.

Someone learned about anaphora in her fake poetry class. I was all set to defend Portman on this one, because 1996 was a very different time – after all it was only three years after Americans were first introduced to the predator mantra from Dazed and Confused: “I get older, they stay the same age.” “Woke” didn’t mean “faux lesbian Katy Perry” and many of the allegations against Allen were not widely know. So questioning her about it is a shameless, vapid ploy for headlines. But Portman had to go and sound insufferable, and in fact the title of her interview is “Natalie Portman Is The Woke Actor We Need Right Now.”

Portman is basically saying that once a situation becomes too convoluted we should sweep it under the rug and think about next steps, which is going to be very useful for the likes of Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K., and of course Woody Allen. What’s done is done! Free pass for everyone as long as Greta Gerwig can make boring movies.

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