Casey Affleck will not present the Best Actress award at the upcoming Academy Awards. As tradition dictates, the winning Best Actor in the previous year usually does it.
Affleck’s intention is to not distract from the historic Hollywood #MeToo movement, an individual familiar with the decision told TheWrap. In fact, the “Manchester By The Sea” star will not attend the ceremony at all.
“We appreciate the decision to keep the focus on the show and on the great work of this year,” an Academy spokesperson told TheWrap.
In 2010, Affleck was served with a lawsuit by Amanda White and Magdalena Gorka, the producer and cinematographer who worked with him on the movie “I’m Still Here.” The two women outlined several instances of “uninvited and unwelcome sexual advances” during filming, which Affleck denied.
The lawsuits were settled out of court for an undisclosed amount, but they resurfaced in the media last year during the run-up to last year’s Oscars after he was nominated for his work in “Manchester By The Sea.” When Affleck was announced as the winner for Best Actor, 2016 Best Actress winner Brie Larson, who was presenting the award, simply gave the Oscar to Affleck and refused to applaud for him.
Affleck told The Boston Globe after his win: “I believe that any kind of mistreatment of anyone for any reason is unacceptable and abhorrent, and everyone deserves to be treated with respect in the workplace and anywhere else.”
Larson, meanwhile, responded to questions about her reaction by saying that “whatever it was that I did onstage kind of spoke for itself.”
Last month, Armie Hammer said in an interview about his film “Call Me By Your Name” that he thought it was a “double standard” that Affleck could win an Oscar despite the accusations towards him while Nate Parker, director and star of the Sundance award-winning “The Birth of a Nation,” had his film and career weighed down by accusations of sexual assault made against him while he was a student at Penn State University in 1999. Hammer later apologized for the comments, saying he did not know that Affleck’s suit was settled and that he should not have “conflated sexual harassment with sexual assault.”
Deadline first reported the news that Affleck plans to bow out of this year’s Oscar telecast.