Casey Affleck is Oscar’s current reigning Best Actor. Would Casey Affleck, alleged sexual harasser, have won that Oscar this year? Last year, during award season, I kept linking to Amy Zimmerman’s excellent piece in The Daily Beast about Casey Affleck’s past. About that lawsuit that he settled out of court. Some people talked about it online but Casey made it through the season pretty much undisturbed – he was largely shielded from any blowback by his management and also by his powerful and influential friends. 

Timing was on Casey Affleck’s side. Because six months later, The New York Times and The New Yorker blew open the Harvey Weinstein story and the Hollywood Predator Advent Calendar decided to show its ass every single day. And now we have another Best Actor Oscar frontrunner with some sh-t on his card. (Two, actually, but we’ll get to James Franco later.) Gary Oldman won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama last night for his performance as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour. Gary wants this bad. Gary is hustling. Gary is playing the game. And Gary is not unpopular in Hollywood. In 2012 at the Palm Springs Film Festival, I watched Jessica Chastain fall to pieces when she met him, her favourite actor. Here’s what Hugh Jackman tweeted a few days ago: 

But everyone is reassessing their faves now. And Gary Oldman is being reassessed:  

So Gary Oldman is trying to say the right things now: 

Twitter outrage doesn’t always reach the Academy. Twitter doesn’t get to vote at the Oscars. The people voting at the Oscars are the ones who work in the industry, many of whom have worked with Gary, many actors who, like Jessica Chastain and Hugh Jackman, consider him a “legend”. Then again, we’re being told that this year is not last year. Casey Affleck got a pass last year. Will Gary Oldman get a pass this year? 

And if he doesn’t get a pass… who gets his votes? 

You know who was invisible last night at the Globes? He was there, but I can’t find any photos of him on the red carpet and no shots of him during the show: Daniel Day-Lewis. DDL is evidently not campaigning. If the noise around Gary Oldman gets louder and DDL has decided he’s doesn’t want to break any Oscar records, who does that leave?