Oscar night is on us and perennial nominee Meryl Streep is back in the news again, whining. It wasn't enough that she sang for her supper with a long-winded, cliche-filled diatribe against Donald Trump at the Golden Globes earlier this month, repeating every leftist canard, hitting every touchstone. Now she's gotten into a fight over evening gowns with leading Parisian designer Karl Lagerfeld, who is well-known for having a politically conservative streak.

It's a he-said, she-said controversy. Last week, Lagerfeld accused Streep of being 'cheap' for refusing to wear one of his gowns at the Oscars, on the grounds that she could get paid to wear someone else's. Streep denied the conversation ever happened, and since then, Lagerfeld has said he may have misunderstood the conversation and issued a faint apology. Streep whined that Lagerfeld had 'ruined' her Oscars. Poor baby.

This is that part of subterranean Hollywood life we are talking about, that part of it where studios claim they have only had losses and no profits on their tax forms, where staffers keep parts of the used film sets as 'benefits,' where product placement in films is paid-for, where swag and goody bags are valued in the hundreds of thousands (bribe, anyone?) and where stars get paid to wear designers' gowns or else get them free based on the 'exposure.' There is apparently plenty more with the papparazzi, such as can be found in the side pages of the Daily Mail, which is known to pay for pieces, raising the question of whether they get paid, too. One wonders what the tax situation is like with all these murky transactions. There's a whiff of unsavory, since these things are not done in normal business elsewhere.

One can just imagine the winks and nods and hints that went on in that Streep-Lagerfeld or my-people-talk-to-your-people conversation, all of which would have been a matter of 'deniability' same as spies and crooks do. Who knows what was really said in those circumstances?

What is obvious is that Streep is making a push for publicity. Her anti-Trump speech at the Golden Globes came just as the Oscar voting was going on. Her nomination this year, for 'Florence Foster Jenkins' is pretty marginal in its chances, at least on merit grounds. Streep, in her whining defense of herself over the Chanel gowns, cites her 19 Oscar nominations, which only calls attention to the fact that she has taken home a Best Actress in a Leading Role gong just once, making her quite the underachiever. She may have been thinking she was bragging about all her nominations, but the results show an overrated actress who gets nominated a lot for virtue-signalling purposes, but when it's time to push the button, very rarely gets the actual award. That must grate hard.

The question now is why she wants to make a name for herself as a world-class whiner? Is that how her career ends? Not as the grand lady of Hollywood, but a non-stop whiner, willing to go political at Oscar-voting time (she never had to this extent before) and getting into spats and scraps with conservative designers?

What a pathetic picture.