Normally, I would pay absolutely no attention to anything Paris Hilton says, except that her anti-gay meltdown yesterday and her apology today are a perfect example of how the media’s learned to process offense. The hotel heiress found herself in headlines again after a New York taxi driver clandestinely taped her speaking with a friend in a cab, in itself a totally gross thing to do, no matter how gross whatever he captured is. And the exchange between Hilton and her friend is both unattractive and ignorant:

“Say I log into Grindr, someone that’s on Grindr can be in that building and it tells you all the locations of where they are and you can be like, ‘Yo, you wanna fuck?’ and he might be on like, the sixth floor,” the friend explains. “Ewww. Eww. To get fucked?” Hilton replies. “Gay guys are the horniest people in the world. They’re disgusting. Dude, most of them probably have AIDS.” “I would be so scared if I were a gay guy,” she adds. “You’ll like, die of AIDS.”

Of course, she’s apologized immediately, releasing a statement through GLAAD:

As anyone close to me knows, I always have been and always will be a huge supporter of the gay community. I am so sorry and so upset that I caused pain to my gay friends, fans and their families with the comments heard this morning. I was having this private conversation with a friend of mine who is gay and our conversation was in no way towards the entire gay community. It is the last thing that I would ever want to do and I cannot put into words how much I wish I could take back every word.HIV/AIDS can hurt anyone, gay and straight, men and women. It’s something I take very seriously and should not have been thrown around in conversation. Gay people are the strongest and most inspiring people I know.

Everyone involved here benefits. Hilton gets herself back in the headlines, and doing something that makes her look comparatively classy: apologizing and praising the resiliency of gay people is an upgrade from getting thrown out of Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium for smoking pot, or turned away from Japan for drug convictions. GLAAD gets its position as the arbiter of publicly (or in this case, privacy-violated ) expressed speech about LGBT people and its role as a redemption engine reaffirmed. And anyone who falls into the category of people who still care about Paris Hilton’s opinion and felt harmed by her speech gets reassured she doesn’t actually mean it. I suppose it’s a good thing that these mechanisms exist. I just wish the standards for making amends were higher, and produced more meaningful results than publicist-brokered apology statements. If we’re going to make famous people go through the motions of bringing their attitudes in line with what’s publicly acceptable, we might as well get more meaningful commitments or donations of time and energy out of them than that.

I finally saw Midnight in Paris this weekend, which I liked much less than I had hoped, if not expected, to. The movie, about a dissatisfied screenwriter who would rather be a novelist and begins to time travel back to Paris in the ’20s while in the city with his awful fiancee and her even more awful parents, is essentially an adaptation of two Allen short stories: “The Kugelmass Episode,” in which a bored New Yorker pays a magician to send him into a novel so he can cheat on his wife with Emma Bovary, and “A Twenties Memory,” a rather more cutting story about what it would be like to hang out with Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway in Paris.

There are two basic problems with the movie. The first is the idea that Owen Wilson, who was much better playing a pretender to literary genius in The Royal Tenenbaums than he is here, playing the real thing, could plausibly have written a novel that would knock Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway on their collective keisters. It’s a real waste to have Kathy Bates play Gertrude Stein and then have her be nice. (Some of the other collected impersonations, among them Alison Pill as Zelda Fitzgerald and Corey Stoll as Hemingway are quite good, but it’s a schtick rather than an actual period piece, cheap laughs rather than profound ones).

But even more annoying is the fact that Wilson and Rachel McAdams’ characters are just never a plausible couple, and the way Allen signals that McAdams and her parents are Bad, Terrible People is to reach back to 2003 and to pretend they’re Republicans who still hate the French over the war in Iraq. Her father, John, is a man who would have insisted on ordering Freedom Fries in 2003, but because he’s in the wrong socio-economic class, spends a lot of time saying things like “I will always take a California wine [over a French one] but the Napa Valley’s 6,000 miles away,” or complaining that “I didn’t like his remark about Tea Party Republicans…They are decent people trying to rescue the country, not cryptofascists.” This, despite the fact that Wilson’s character does things like gratuitously insult his future father-in-law’s politics over dinner. And when Wilson’s character steals a pair of McAdams’ character’s earrings, hoping to give them to the woman in ’20s Paris he intends to sleep with, he gets caught, but tries to make sure she doesn’t blame the theft on their maid, only to have McAdams respond, “You always take the side of the help. That’s why Daddy says you’re a Communist!”

I say this not to defend Republicans, but to note that this idea of Republicans is the smuggest, most self-satisfied liberal conception possible. And that, as much as Allen’s recycling of his own material, that shows the filmmaker’s age. Nothing about Midnight in Paris is illuminating or morally searching in the way either Match Point or Vicky Cristina Barcelona were. It’s an old filmmaker relaxing into ideas and biases that feel comfortable for him, and apparently for a lot of other moviegoers.