Slate‘s Amanda Hess has posted an article about what Cate Blanchett should say (or not say) when she wins the Best Actress Oscar Sunday night. Hess suggests that Blanchett might be damned if she thanks director-writer Woody Allen and damned if she doesn’t. I’ll tell you what won’t work, and that’s what Blanchett said when she collected her Outstanding Performer of the Year award at the Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival. She confined herself at that moment to thanking her Blue Jasmine costars, almost certainly because Blanchett and her publicist had calculated that mentioning Allen that night (only hours after Dylan Farrow’s letter had appeared in Nicholas Kristof‘s N.Y. Times column) would be unwise. It would obviously be ungracious to not mention Allen tomorrow night. On top of which the Dylan-Mia-Ronan brouhaha has been losing steam for two or three weeks now. (It peaked when Allen responded to the charges in a N.Y. Times-published letter.) Blanchett’s Oscar is about what she did with an Allen-created character. It’s finally about her craft but on the other hand she can’t imply that her performance just happened on its own.