
Is it OK to celebrate Woody Allen? Many fans thought, with some relief, that this question had finally been settled, with the public beginning to relax about the public scandals that destroyed his family in the 90s, and the filmmaker himself at long last returning to professional form. (It has never been clear to me, incidentally, which was deemed by the masses to be Allen's more grievous fault: running off with his longterm partner Mia Farrow's adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, or going off the boil and making dross like The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. These, shall we say, missteps seemed, in the eyes of the media, to be interchangeable, probably with some mutual causation.) Clearly the Hollywood Foreign Press Association felt all that "unpleasantness" was over when they decided to give him the Cecil B DeMille Lifetime Achievement award this year, accepted on his behalf by his former partner Diane Keaton.
But, it turned out, they were wrong. Debates about Allen's morality began to roll like angry thunder early Sunday evening when various writers voiced their impatience with the Globes for giving Allen the prize and an awards event that in recent years has been celebrated as being one of the most fun (thank you, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler) became one of the most divisive. By the end, the anger erupted into fury:
"Missed the Woody Allen tribute - did they put the part where a woman publicly confirmed he molested her at age seven before or after Annie Hall?" tweeted Ronan Farrow, Allen and Mia Farrow's son, when the event finished. Mia Farrow was more vague in her digs during the evening ("Time to grab some ice-cream and switch over to Girls [sic]," she tweeted obliquely minutes before the Allen tribute), but by the morning, perhaps inspired by her son, she was on the case with a vengeance: "A woman has publicly detailed Woody Allen's molestation of her at age 7. GoldenGlobe tribute showed contempt for her & all abuse survivors [sic]," she tweeted, while the photo of her sweetly smiling face sat somewhat incongruously next to her raging comment.