Whores Woody Allen Has Known

While I have not seen Vicky Cristina Barcelona, I was never more sure of anything in my entire life than I was that Penelope Cruz would win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in the movie.

The whore in the Woody Allen film always wins the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Well maybe the woman does not always win, and maybe the woman is not technically a whore, but peep this:

• Mariel Hemmingway, 1979, nominated for playing the 17-year-old lover of Allen's 41-year-old teacher in Manhattan


• Judy Davis, 1992, nominated for playing an unfaithful wife in Husbands & Wives


• Mira Sorvino, 1995, won for playing a call girl in Mighty Aphrodite


• Penelope Cruz, 2008, won for playing the slutty ex-wife of a painter in Vicky Cristina Barcelona

I will never know whether any of these actresses deserved their awards from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences because I am observing a one-man boycott of Woody Allen. I find the Allen morally repugnant, physically off-putting, psychologically alien, and generally unfunny. As for Sra. Cruz, I find her neither attractive nor interesting.

That's just me, but, hey, you gotta know what you don't want.

What Academy voters want, it seems, is whores. Just scroll through the list of Supporting Actress nominees since 1936. Starting right off the bat with Beulah Bondi in The Gorgeous Hussy (1936) through Donna Reed in From Here to Eternity (1953), Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver (1976), and Judi Dench as Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love (1998), being shown putting your virtue up for sale seems to be a sure way to earn Oscar buzz.

There's an Aesop-level metaphorical moral about the nature of Hollywood success in there somewhere.