God bless Cate Blanchett for fitting a brutal Steve Bannon diss into her statement on sexual harassment
Cate Blanchett is one of those actors that seems almost supernatural, capable of disappearing into roles as large as Bob Dylan and Galadriel, while instantly imbuing more popcorn fare like the upcoming Thor: Ragnarok with a sense of knowing intelligence. Hell, she was the lone bright spot on the worst Indiana Jones movie. She radiates a sense of poise that comes through in how she carries herself and, indeed, how she dresses, leading to her being awarded a Style Icon award at the InStyle Awards yesterday. She used the opportunity to make a powerful statement about sexual harassment and also to take a huge shit on mutant turd Steve Bannon.
After thanking a number of designers, as well as her longtime stylist Elizabeth Stewart, she contextualized the award as part of the broader cultural conversation about Hollywood’s deeply engrained objectification of women, which has enabled alleged predators like Harvey Weinstein:
For me, the true icons of style, and I think there’s a bit of a theme emerging here tonight, it’s that for me it’s always those women who’ve been utterly themselves without apology—whose physical presence and their aesthetic is really integrated in a non self-conscious way. Women who know how they look, it’s not all of who they are but just an extension of that, and it’s about women who feel free to wear what they want when they want and how they want to wear it.
She then pivoted to address her diametric cultural opposite:
Women like looking sexy, but it doesn’t mean we want to fuck you. No one says to Steve Bannon, “You look like a bag of trash. Do you want me to throw you out?” But the comments that get said about what women wear on the red carpet—I mean. If you troll through those trolls on the Internet, just don’t.
Steve Bannon presumably responded by murdering one of those trolls for sport, drinking the black blood that sprayed from its neck, then floating around in his massive bodysuit while Sting looked on cackling.