Sydney Sweeney shrugs it off

Sydney Sweeney has been in New York the last couple of days, on a final push for Christy, which opens this weekend. 

As Sarah noted earlier this week, Halloween weekend was the worst weekend at the box office this year and the industry is desperately hoping that this coming weekend might not be as dire. Predator: Badlands is the new release that’s expected to come out on top but for Sydney, the hope is that Christy can make some noise, if for no other reason than she needs to be able to squeeze some kind of win out of its commercial performance to stay in the Oscar Best Actress race. 

She had good momentum coming out of TIFF where the film had its world premiere. Since then, though, it seems like she’s plateaued. Jessie Buckley remains the frontrunner for a nomination for her work in Hamnet, and Cynthia Erivo and Renate Reinsve are interchangeable in second and third. After there, there’s a long list of contenders, like Emma Stone (who you can never count out because of her popularity with the Academy), Rose Byrne, Amanda Seyfried, Jennifer Lawrence, and Kate Hudson. Plus Chase Infiniti, the breakout star of One Battle After Another, who is attached to a film that might lead all nominations overall, and that’s always a key factor for an actor on the campaign. 

Sydney is definitely in the mix, but if you believe the Oscar pundits, she has some ground to make up… although, in my opinion, that has nothing to do with her American Eagle controversy from the summer. It’s ludicrous to suggest, again in my opinion, that it hurt her at all. It’s not like she had to scale back any appearances, it’s not like she’s been any less visible. And GQ just gave her one of the covers of their Men of the Year issue, a feature meant to celebrate the top performers of the year. Tell me again how it hurt her? It didn’t.

So of course she didn’t have to address it, not really. 

In the full interview, which you can read here, Sydney is asked about the jeans thing again. Here’s the question and her response: 

Is there something that you want to say about the ad itself? The criticism of the content was basically that, maybe specifically in this political climate, white people shouldn’t joke about genetic superiority.

Answer: “I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear.”

Then, immediately afterwards, American Eagle sales came up. And she had MORE WORDS to say about the financial performance of that controversial campaign than she did about the controversy itself: 

“I was aware of the numbers as it was going. So when I saw all the headlines of in-store visits were down a certain percentage, none of it was true. It was all made up, but nobody could say anything because [the company was] in their quiet period. So it was all just a lot of talk. And because I knew at the end of the day what that ad was for, and it was great jeans, it didn’t affect me one way or the other.”

So… you don’t want to correct the discourse that you subtexted white supremacist ideology but you do want to correct the discourse about how profitable you are? OK. 

But whether that does or doesn’t tell us who she is almost doesn’t matter, she’s shrugging it off because she’s learned that she can shrug it off. The takeaway for Sydney Sweeney from this situation is that, well, she’s kind of unsinkable right now. By the way, she tells GQ that she’s single but she and Scooter Braun have been holding hands all over the place.