Casey Affleck will not attend this year’s Oscars to present Best Actress
January 26, 2018
Someone asked me on Twitter this week if I thought, given James Franco’s Oscar “snub,” if Casey Affleck would have been snubbed for an Oscar nomination too, if only Manchester by the Sea had come out in 2017 instead of 2016. Since we’ll never really know, my best guess is that Affleck still would have had the Hollywood connections and he would have gotten the nomination, but all hell would have broken loose during the last stretch of the campaign. As I said, we’ll never really know, so we just have to live with the fact that the Academy voters handed the Best Actor Oscar to a guy who settled several sexual misconduct/harassment cases out of court. So now that we’re in the wake of #MeToo and women reclaiming their time and their voices, what’s a Gropey Affleck Bro to do? Run and hide. Casey Affleck won’t be presenting at the Oscars this year.
Casey Affleck has withdrawn from this year’s Oscars ceremony, where, if the Academy chose to follow tradition, he would have presented the best actress award.
Affleck won his best actor Oscar in 2017 for his role in Manchester by the Sea. Oscars tradition dictates that the previous year’s best actor winner presents the Oscar to the following year’s best actress recipient. But that tradition isn’t ironclad. At the 81st Oscars, for example, each of the acting awards were presented by a quintet of past Oscar winners, and Michael De Luca and Jennifer Todd, who are producing this year’s show, have been considering departing from tradition when it comes to presenting the acting awards this year.
If Affleck were to participate in this year’s ceremony, his presence could have been problematic. During last year’s awards season, accusations of inappropriate behavior on his part on the set of 2010′s I’m Still Here resurfaced. That year, two women working on the film filed civil suits against Affleck, accusing him of sexual harassment. The actor denied the charges, and the suits were settled out of court and dismissed. But amid the current #MeToo movement, some had already begun to criticize the possibility that Affleck could participate in this year’s Oscar show.
Well… that’s sort of a letdown, right? Like, I was ready to fight about this. I was ready to scream at the TV when Casey came trotting out in the last 20 minutes of the show to present Best Actress. But he finally gets it: he’s not wanting. His presence would be distracting and ridiculous given everything that’s happened in the past four months. Is this a rare moment of self-awareness on his part? Perhaps. He doesn’t get a f–king cookie for doing this though.
Photos courtesy of WENN.
