Armond White blames the negative response to his NYFCC performance on media conspiracy, racism
Ever willing to take a slight to its nuclear hissy fit conclusion, New York Press contrarian Armond White has issued a response to all those who took issue with his controversial stint hosting the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, and not surprisingly, it’s chock-full of even more castigation and martyrdom. To begin with, they started it: Dismissing Michelle Williams as “naïve” and Mark Ruffalo as “gullible” for following Darren Aronofosky’s “weak joke” with their own negative remarks, White characterizes their behavior at the ceremony as “inanity” that sparked the “old antagonisms” between critic and artist—antagonisms that he says Annette Bening even specifically addressed in her speech (during which she did not cry, despite what some may have reported).
Quoting that speech at length, White calls attention to Bening’s understanding of the performer’s and reviewer’s mutual “vulnerability” when it comes to criticism, and the symbiotic relationship between filmmakers and those whose job it is to “keep a close eye on us,” a sentiment that White felt put a “humanizing” touch on things in a “gracious, almost sexy-maternal way.” White’s abiding adoration for Bening is reinforced by an accompanying photo of the two of them together, surrounded by cartoon hearts. (No, really.)
Unfortunately, White says, that need for equality doesn’t fall in line with what he views as a tacit conspiracy between his fellow critics and “undistinguished bloggers” (Hey, that's us!), orchestrated as a way of “perpetuating the power advantage of exorbitantly paid Hollywoodians over their Fourth Estate handmaidens.” It’s the self-flagellating method of reviewers making themselves out to be inferior in deference to “the promotion of money and power” (“They welcome being pissed on by movie people”) that White says led to some of his fellow critics openly lying about at what exactly went on that night. According to White, all reports on his behavior were nothing more than “deliberate distortion… [that] has viciously misrepresented the truth” in order to “damage my reputation,” but more relevantly “intimidate readers and journalists to be subservient to celebrities.” This, lest the whole fragile status quo we’ve established here in the entertainment industry fall apart, and people stop caring about famous people enough to read about them, we suppose.
Anyway, White specifically singles out The Village Voice’s Jim Hoberman and Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum as the perpetrators of said “sick fantasies and vituperation”—something he says is tantamount to committing “public indecency… an offensive, unwanted display of private parts”—and claims they lied about his comments because they are “so consumed with envy and anger” at his tenure as the NYFCC chair. (The “yer just jealous!” defense—always an ace in the hole for those looking to make an argument about the importance of equality.) It actually gets nastier and more personal from there, with White describing Hoberman and Schwarzbaum as pouting children who "huddle together, sniggering and giggling in packs like the not-cool kids in junior high school,” as well as “middleclass cowards who resent less-empowered people not like themselves.” Then it’s on to White’s failsafe strategy: unsubstantiated accusations of racism, followed by yet more lacerating personal attacks: