Sean Penn still hasn’t apologized for his Oscar “joke”. When he was presenting the Best Picture Oscar to Birdman, Penn quipped, “Who gave this son of a bitch his green card?” As I said at the time, Penn is actually friends with Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu and they worked together on 21 Grams. And for what it’s worth, Inarritu thought the joke was “hilarious.” But people were still offended. And Sean Penn offered no apologies, half-assed or sincere.

I wonder if reporters will ask him about it while he promotes his new film, The Gunman. So far, this week, no one has asked him anything. We’ve been saying for months that Penn seems especially chilled out now that he’s with Charlize Theron, but I would imagine that if an enterprising journalist really pushed him about the joke, Penn would probably punch the journo. Meanwhile, Penn IS giving interesting quotes, just not about the Oscars. Penn spoke to the Shortlist this week about acting as a craft, a career and a living. Some highlights:

Penn doesn’t think much of actors these days: “I think many actors have disgraced their craft and are left to celebrity status in many cases. They’re mostly the punks for what the studio wants to do.”

He did ‘The Gunman’ for the money: “Listen man, you get divorced, you pay a few fines and you get involved in something where it’s hard to get people to dig in their pockets and you have to dig in your own, and you’ve got kids, and by the time you finish directing a movie you’ve paid for it more than you’ve been paid for it. There are a lot worse ways of making a living than doing something that fascinates you, and acting does fascinate me.”

Being famous versus being an actor: “I think acting today, by and large, is more associated with a fame-building game than anything to do with a gift. It’s supposed to be a giving and not taking industry, and today it’s more about the take.”

It’s not weird for a man his age to play the lead in an action film: “President Obama’s biggest surprise when he met the Seals who went into Abbottabad to get Bin Laden was that they were old. It’s also a conversation about who’s going to the movies these days. Maybe older people go the theatre more and will identify [with someone my age], while kids are looking at movies on their laptops.”

[From Shortlist via Channel 24 & The Irish Independent]

I enjoy the fact that he doesn’t see the hypocrisy of slamming actors for being studio chore-monkeys while admitting that yes, he signs on to movies just because he needs the money. I guess Sean Penn is the only one allowed to sell out in the name of craft, in the name of art. But when other actors try to balance studio projects to pay the bills and smaller, important work, suddenly they’re “punks” and “celebrities” (the ultimate pejorative, I suppose).

And I wonder what Charlize Theron thinks about that? She’s one of those actor/celebrities balancing small projects, studio projects and lucrative endorsement deals. Incidentally, when Sean and Charlize were in France for the Cesars, he spoke to a French outlet about Charlize. The reporter referred to Charlize as his girlfriend and Sean corrected him, saying: “No, no, excuse me, Charlize is not my girlfriend. She’s the love of my life.” God, they’re really doing this, aren’t they?

Photos courtesy of WENN, Fame/Flynet.