I’m glad people are finally hip to the program—Juno’s Academy Award-winning “legitimacy” only further drags scriptwriter Diablo Cody’s reputation into the brackish puddle of square mud. (I won’t say that I said it first, Slate and Gawker, even though I pretty much did.) Attacking Cody, as the Gawker article, “Diablo Cody Backlash in Full Swing,” does, is now all-too-easy. Cody’s vulnerability is two-pronged: it can come from both the corporate and indie side of things. To the suits, this woman who’s “personally put [her] vag out there” and would do so again if “the Beef Council would cough up the proper endorsement money” is a liability to her reputation among the “just folks” demographic, which is only slowly warming up to family-friendly filmmakers openly bearing their vaginas. To the hipsters whom she briefly won over, she’s an opportunist in trendy clothing—a person who’d “leak” nude pictures of herself onto the Web might very well be as coyly spurious as the dialogue she writes. Jason Reitman, Juno’s director, has been consistently backgrounded—probably because he dutifully served Cody’s language like those Nazis who were “just following orders”—and will probably fall into hack mediocrity making yet more conservative pictures packaged for liberals.

But then, still basking in the limelight, is Ellen Page—opportunist and backstabber. She herself mocked Cody on Saturday Night Live, where an unflattering male impersonator of Cody egged Page into delivering Juno-esque patter. This might have been copacetic with me if she hadn’t prefaced her slander with “I’ve had an amazing year! I was nominated with an Academy Award for my role in Juno…”—delivered in the exact manner of the sexperimental teenie-bopper that Cody provided for her. It’s just a joke—yes, I know—but it’s a cowardly one. Page wouldn’t dare assail her grotesquely popular movie (or her part in it) even now that it’s gotten some flack, but she doesn’t mind flogging its scapegoat, the very same woman who called Page “superhuman” in her acceptance speech. One can’t blame everyone involved (you can come out from hiding, Michael Cera and Jenifer Garner—even if the latter did devote too many acting muscles to her cardboard-cutout character…), but the Juno phenomenon is not just the fault of its so-called stripper-cum-blogger-cum-screenwriter. The person who embodied the title role must take some responsibility, too.

Perhaps the continual praise for Page’s performance is merely a reflex for those who can’t quite admit entirely that they were wrong about the movie. I stand by my initial analysis that she was good at timing the deluge of her precious verbiage, but I’d be pulling a Diablo Cody if I were to say it was an Oscar nomination-worthy performance. From the “criticisms” I’ve read, you’d think that the concept of someone-acting-sarcastic-to-conceal-their-true-feelings was an invention of Page’s. Wowee!

I hardly remember the young actress from the X-Men flicks and I’ve yet to see Hard Candy or any of her more “out there” pictures where she reportedly gives good performances. (If the rumors are true, I shan’t retract my forthcoming remarks, but at least I’ll feel better about the world.) But how could this 21-year-old, who’s been quoted on IMDB as saying such truistic statements as, “I don’t really want to do the Hollywood thing. I think you ought to try to say something with your movies,” and “I don’t care if people like my character. I just want them to think about the movie’s message” conscientiously play Juno? How could an actress who claims to be a “feminist” who “tries to steer clear of the ‘stereotypical roles for teenage girls’ because she finds them to be ‘sexist,’” really take pride in a this-side-of-Hollywood flick about a girl whose best buddy is her dad and who cares so deeply about “true” (monogamous) love with a boy? What could be more “Hollywood”?

If anything, Juno asserts pre-feminist messages, the most obvious of which is “keep the baby.” Having conservative values is one thing, but to sugarcoat them in the name of the almighty dollar is yet another. (As of February 17th, Juno has grossed $125,047,654.) And then to persist in standing by your hypocrisy while hopping on the burgeoning bandwagon against it… Ellen Page has secured mainstream success by selling what she would have formerly claimed to be her soul; for her to toss cruel jokes at Cody’s expense as though she’s not her accomplice or promoter or friend may be a receipt of that sale.

So, all of you converts out there who have come to dislike this most controversial of Academy Award nominees, I applaud you. But please remember, this is the “Juno backlash”—to save all your vitriol for Diablo Cody is to let other guilty parties off the hook.