Will We Let Sean Penn Destroy His Oscar Chances?

Posted by Michael Dance

The Dichotomy of Sean Penn

Sean Penn currently has an extremely good chance to win the Best Actor Oscar for Milk -- he's the solid frontrunner, with Mickey Rourke from The Wrestler the underdog challenger -- and my first inclination is that a cover article he wrote in The Nation, dedicated to Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro, won't change that -- even though the article is described as "a love letter" to the two American-hating foreign leaders.

So what? His public persona has always been that of a very angry person who probably harbors some wacky political ideas, so the piece only confirms what everybody already knew, right? It couldn't turn into the kind of bad press that can hurt your Oscar chances.

Well...where it gets tricky -- and heavily ironic -- is that Penn may well have pissed off the very community that he'll soon be nominated for championing: gays. The person who described Penn's article as "a love letter"? That would be James Kirchick of The Advocate, who in his rebuttal piece likens Penn's writing to yesteryear articles about the Soviet Union:

It hearkens back to the notorious dispatches penned by Westerners fresh from the Soviet Union who reported on the amazing progress of the workers' paradise. These worshipful epistles, often published in The Nation, neglected to mention anything about the gulag, the “disappearance” of political dissidents, the Ukrainian famine, or any other such inconvenient truths about communism. Lenin termed the individuals who delivered these apologetics “useful idiots,” and Penn and his enablers are nothing if not that.

Aside from just painting Penn as a naive liberal who needs to take his anti-America streak down a notch, Kirchick takes him to task because Chavez and Castro have a very long history of being very, very intolerant, something Penn's article completely ignores:

Not long after the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro ordered the internment of gay people in prison labor camps, where they were murdered or worked to death for their “counterrevolutionary tendencies.”
Over the gate of one of these camps were the words “Work Will Make Men Out of You,” an eerie homage to the welcome sign at Auschwitz instructing Jews on their way to the gas chambers that “Work Will Make You Free.” (The plight of gays in the Cuban revolution is movingly told in the novel Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas, made into a film starring Javier Bardem. Playing a gay character in a film that has both an antitotalitarian and pro-gay message, Bardem is an “ally” less morally compromised than Penn.) In the early years of the regime, Raul Castro was notorious for ordering the summary execution of its opponents, including people whose only crime was their homosexuality. This is the man with whom Penn was “in stitches” knocking back glasses of red wine.

As you may have guessed by now, "skewer" is too soft a word for Kirchick's attack on Penn. The dude destroys him. The full article is pure entertainment.

The question remains: will this get picked up by more press and start hurting Penn? Of the Oscar blogs, the L.A. Times already picked up on it, as did In Contention.

Early this year, Marion Cotillard -- the surprise Best Actress winner for La Vie En Rose -- got a large heaping of bad press when someone dug up an interview from early 2007 in which she said she doubted the official stories of -- groan -- 9/11, and -- double groan + eye roll -- the moon landing. (Someone had been reading too many YouTube comments, apparently.)

But luckily for her, it only turned into a story after she had won.

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Will We Let Sean Penn Destroy His Oscar Chances?

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