Hollywood Thanked Harvey as Much as They Thanked God

What’s more, he and the Big Guy come in second overall, ranking only behind venerated director Steven Spielberg in sincere, hearty, Hollywood thank yous, according to Quartz business brief.

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The disgraced film producer was personally thanked or praised by name in at least 34 Academy Awards acceptance speeches from 1993 through 2016, based on a Quartz analysis of speeches through 1966 that were archived by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences*. That’s as much as God—and more than almost any other individual in the industry.

If you can handle it, Quartz even provides a compilation of many of those thank yous, emanating from the perfect lips of household names as well as relative unknowns that we’ve listened to shame us for years over this conservative policy and that Republican president.

Of course Weinstein, who had the reputation for taking on risky film projects and seeing those films become box office and critical hits, made a lot of people very rich in Hollywood. So perhaps thanks are in order. His films were nominated for Academy Awards something like 300 times. And while his secret was still safely nothing more than the elephant in the living room, the glitterati had no problem thanking him, and profusely apparently.

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As Brad Slager wrote last week, Weinstein embodied the “do as we say” hypocrisy of Hollywood.

So the luminary players who preach feminism from the dais of award shows, and with empowering content in scripts, saw fit to excuse the worst type of misogyny, for decades. The same people who are currently tearing into Carolina quarterback Cam Newton for a toss away remark provided cover for a power broker in Hollywood treating actresses like cocktail shrimp. Weinstein’s behavior elicits no surprise. The industry that (after loving itself) loves nothing better than telling you how to live your life has a very hard time following its own lectures. Harvey Weinstein is the very embodiment of this conflicting lifestyle.

That said, of course Hollywood stayed mum about the proclivities of the man that it looks very likely most of them outright knew about, or at least suspected, given the scope of his assaults. As it was put so eloquently on Twitter by talk radio host Wayne Dupree:

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The accolades have quieted, and the condemnation and distancing has begun with many stars telling stories of their own bad experiences with the man, or their pitiful-sounding excuses for why they never spoke up. Harvey has been fired, his wife has left him, and he’s likely facing criminal charges.

Yet he seems to be trying the rather odd strategy (and still wholly unsurprising for a leftist Hollywood elitist) of conjuring up sympathy as a victim.

https://twitter.com/molratty/status/918934774001143808

If he succeeds, that would be the performance of the year.

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