Everybody hates Anne

MANILA, Philippines - Hating is such an Internet thing. Along with the great things it has brought us (Maru the cat, reddit, the language of gifs, and Carly Rae Jepsen), comes a massive hate machine that carries an infection spreading faster than the hot new STD in town.The latest target of this said machine is Anne Hathaway, now Academy Award winner for Supporting Actress. Googling “Anne Hathaway annoying” yields results from The Huffington Post  (“How Annoying is Anne Hathaway: A Scientific Inquiry”), The Daily Beast and Gawker, all attempting to explain this wave of hatred. It’s the new norm, just like gushing about Jennifer Lawrence and how totally kewt she is. J. Law is the new LOLCAT and Anne is the new Nickelback.

The awards season is the perfect time to unleash the smarmy from every actor desperate to get the attention of Academy voters. This is the time when they put on a happy face and campaign tirelessly for weeks on end, especially if they are firm on winning Oscar gold. Kate Winslet was the subject of a backlash when she was campaigning for her The Reader and delivered speeches as contrived and calculated as Hathaway’s. Melissa Leo got into a controversy of her own when it was revealed she paid for her own tacky “For Your Consideration” headshots.

Hathaway’s road to the Oscars started when she got the role of Fantine in Tom Hooper’s Les Miserables, a role that’s been destined for Oscar glory since it fell into Hooper’s prestige-baiting hands. During the filming, her co-stars have been gushing about her excellent performance and how she’s already secured an Oscar win (“After Annie’s first day of rehearsal, I said to Tom, ‘You can just turn the camera on, digitally remove the script from her hands, and she’s going to win the Academy Award,’” Hugh Jackman told Vogue).

Hathaway has been going nonstop for eight months about what she did for the role: how she lost 25 pounds through a near-starvation diet, how she was in tears when her hair was hacked (with a knife) and was subsequently auctioned off for charity. These are things that any actress could freely talk about when discussing the demands of the role they’re taking in, especially when it’s something as significant as Fantine, but when it could also hit the right buttons for a premature Oscar campaign (see Emma Fitzpatrick’s hilarious skewering of Hathaway’s bid for the Oscars in her parody of I Dreamed a Dream).

Numerous posts across the Internet, from Salon to Buzzfeed, have tried to explain this curious phenomenon. Reasons for the hate range from the ludicrous (the economy), jealousy (“She’s too perfect, like that overeager theater kid everyone is annoyed with”), her star sign (“She’s a Scorpio. Scorpios are much more intense and can intimidate people”), to just plain inarticulation (“I don’t know why I hate her, I just do.”)

People also cite her acceptance speeches as their basis for their dislike (not so much as hate, being a strong word). Her Golden Globe speech, however likeable because she gave props to co-nominee Sally Field for being “a vanguard against typecasting,” was criticized as put-on and cloying. Her speeches followed the same formula since then: cracking a joke, pausing to let people laugh, expressing disbelief, profuse thanks to her family, her agents, the Les Miserables cast and crew, and ending with a shout-out to her new beau. She’s hit bumps along the way: calling out the Critics Choice Awards committee for misspelling her name onscreen while she accepted her award, delivering a bizarro speech at Screen Actors Guild Awards (“I just want to thank my casts… because I was in two great casts this year,” she said), and then calling Victor Hugo, the long dead author of Les Miserables, “honey” in her BAFTA speech.

Hathaway’s speeches have turned into mini-performances and by the time she finally won an Oscar last Sunday, people were quick to roll in disgust and slam pizzas on their television/computer screens. The New Yorker’s Michael Schullman even gave her speech a C+ (second to the lowest grade of the Oscar speeches that he gave, the lowest being Quentin Tarantino’s). “The whole thing smacked of endless nights rehearsing in front of the mirror. After a dutifully memorized laundry list of names, Hathaway closed with the wish that ‘someday in the not too distant future, the misfortunes of Fantine will only be found in stories.’ I’m sure all the consumptive French prostitutes with bad dentistry who were watching the Oscars appreciated that,” he wrote.

Is Anne Hathaway really that much of a self-assured, confident woman to deserve all this kind of hatred? Definitely, no. It may just be a bad timing for an actress to flaunt perfection when someone like Jennifer Lawrence is loved for her unapologetic crassness and vulgarity — an antithesis to Hathaway’s good girl cool. Her determination to win and desire to please may have put off people but it doesn’t diminish the fact that she’s one of the best actresses of her generation. She’s lashed out against commodification of women and violence but still gets flak, even from feminist journos like Ann Friedman for her Rachel Berry/Tracy Flick antics. When actresses like Hathaway climb their way up to success, all the badmouthing and takedowns tiptoe the line between high school chatter and absurd sexism. There are more things out there that deserve all the hate and attention and it seems silly to pour it all on a girl who’s just bent on making her dreams come true. You can dislike her for her attention-seeking tactics but she’s proven that no matter how much negativity you pile against her, there’s no stopping a woman with enough determination, talent, and will to succeed.

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