This Hollywood scandal is different

It’s going to be a woozy, what-have-I-done “awards season,” as Hollywood terms the five-month self-celebratory run-up to the Oscars (next held on March 4). Shrill speeches about the misdeeds of Donald Trump are going to sound hollow, if not absurd, now that we know what Hollywood has known about itself for all these years. The men either participated in the plot to treat women as communal sexual property, or, knowing about it, said nothing. The women knew even more about it, and also said nothing. Gwyneth Paltrow was sexually harassed by Harvey Weinstein when she was 22; four years later she was tearfully thanking him for his “undying support” from the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as she clutched her Oscar. Every day that everyone remained silent amounted to tacit endorsement for allowing the depravity to continue. And each day another wagon-load of young cuties arrived in town to be put through the meat grinder, determined to crack the code of “how things are done” in pursuit of becoming the next Ringwald, or Paltrow, or Nyong’o. Hollywood, says Tarantino, has been “operating under an almost Jim Crow-like system” to oppress women. That comment must be causing a chill of recognition throughout the industry: What if we were the villains all along?