You can tell Oscar season is upon us.
Kate Winslet has pulled a Timothee Chalamet and thrown Woody Allen and Roman Polanski under the bus, cleansing herself from past “sins.” She now again has a “clean” slate according to the Twiteratti wokesters and now has a path for the Academy to safely, without any backlash, nominate her much-buzzed performance in the upcoming “Ammonite.” Good God, Kate.
Vanity Fair‘s Julie Miller has Winslet’s exact quote as going: “It’s like, what the fuck was I doing working with Woody Allen and Roman Polanski? It’s unbelievable to me now how those men were held in such high regard, so widely in the film industry and for as long as they were. It’s fucking disgraceful.
“And I have to take responsibility for the fact that I worked with them both. I can’t turn back the clock. I’m grappling with those regrets but what do we have if we aren’t able to just be fucking truthful about all of it?”
Winslet worked with Polanski in 2011’s “Carnage,” and Allen in 2017’s “Wonder Wheel.”
Winslet has suddenly, calculatingly, decided that it isn’t cool to have had a past with these two directors because, apparently, her #MeToo convictions are just too strong now. This is maddening. Disgraceful. A rewriting of film history by way of peer pressure.
Is this an attempt by Winslet to revive what is a career-crushing choice of roles in the last decade? What else would you call a 10-year span that included duds such as “Labor Day,” “Divergent,” “Insurgent,” “A Little Chaos,” “The Dressmaker,” “Collateral Beauty,” “The Mountain Between Us,” and “Blackbird”? "With “Ammonite,” the 44-year-old actress has a shot at gaining back some kind of relevance and that means it’s time to atone for past sins.
I’m not going to get into the Polanski story because it has way too many layers and a case could be made for both sides. But, as for Woody Allen, I’ve written extensively about the Mia Farrow/Ronan Farrow smear campaign that was created to destroy his career, taking advantage of a #MeToo movement which was heating up in the fall of 2017. You can read my write-up, The Case for Woody Allen's Innocence, for all the facts that relate to this case. I have nothing more to add, the proof is in the pudding. Winslet should hang her head down in shame for what she said today.