What do you do if Hollywood has been rocked for months by the biggest sex-harassment scandal ever and the Academy Awards are coming up and you’re running a film-industry trade paper that’s in the habit of putting out an annual Oscars issue?
Well, if you’re the editors of Variety, you put your heads together and decide to grace your cover with the most courageous victim of Hollywood sexism ever – namely, Barbra Streisand.
Written by Ramin Setoodeh, the slobberingly obsequious cover story is entitled “Barbra Streisand on How She Battled Hollywood’s Boys’ Club.” It opens with what must be the millionth account of what, one gathers, was the great anti-woman crime of the twentieth century: the denial of an Oscar nomination to Babs for her direction of Yentl (1983). How dare they overlook her while nominating five males, including some Swede named Bergman! “It really showed the sexism,” Streisand tells Setoodeh.
She tells this to Setoodeh, mind you, “over a cup of tea at her her stunning Malibu estate.” That’s Hollywood female victimhood for you, folks!
Streisand isn’t embarrassed to still be whining about her supposed snub 34 years later. Then again, when has she ever displayed the slightest sign of embarrassment about anything? What’s a bit more surprising than her eternal self-obsessed kvetching is that neither Setoodeh nor his editors at Variety seem to have sensed any contradiction whatsoever between her endless complaints about patriarchal indignities she’s suffered in the film biz (once, when she was directing The Prince of Tides, her crew refused to work overtime) and the ample evidence of her own professional triumph served up in the article itself – from Setoodeh’s giddy description of her estate to the cover photo of her surrounded by a profusion of Oscars, Grammys, Emmys, and Golden Globes.
Think about it: since the takedown of Harvey Weinstein, dozens of Hollywood careers have been lost, scores of black dresses designed and fitted for the Golden Globes, hundreds of Time’s Up buttons proudly brandished, thousands of celebrity #metoo hashtags tweeted and re-tweeted, and heaven knows how many pious, pompous, publicist-written-and-approved speeches about male oppression in the entertainment industry delivered on talk shows, at rallies, and from the stages of awards galas. Formerly silenced and suppressed women in Hollywood, Setoodeh solemnly pronounces, are “finally gaining control of their own narrative.”