Chris Rock is returning to host the Oscars this Sunday amid the #OscarsSoWhite protests.
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“The tricky issue was the fact that the two leads are female and a third large supporting character is also female, so the males have necessarily a lesser supporting role and I think that makes for some tricky financing prospects… I’m only here cause Ellen said no. And I’m sure she said no like eight times”.
A Los Angeles Times study shows just how much work the academy has to do if it intends to reflect the audience it serves – and just how aggressive the group’s new goals are. “That’s kind of the standard”, Rock, 51, continued.
This year’s Academy Awards at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood, airing at 7 p.m. Sunday on ABC. But he has been dropping hints on his Instagram page.
Producers have assembled a diverse array of presenters for Sunday’s show, including Morgan Freeman, Sofia Vergara, Kevin Hart, Whoopi Goldberg, Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey, Kerry Washington, Quincy Jones and “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” director J.J. Abrams and star Daisy Ridley.
Rock shared a snap, dressed as an astronaut. His caption read, “Getting my outfit together”. “We will not comment further on this”, Rock’s publicist, Leslie Sloane, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Chris Rock is hosting the Oscars for the second time. I remember I was disappointed as a kid that the Tower of Terror wasn’t as scary as my neighborhood. You can go to whole movies and not see one black woman.
Other stars’ plans were unknown.
“You know the academy is going to get what it paid for”, says Michael Dennis, a Philadelphia filmmaker and creator of the Reelblack.com movie website, who’s known Rock since his student days at NYU when Dennis produced a short documentary on the before-he-was-famous Brooklyn-raised comic.
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Plus, he would find himself in the company of some of Hollywood’s biggest names. He also said the timing of the event, set for the last weekend of Black History Month, was not meant as an Oscar slight. “There may be a myth that the diversity challenges facing other Academy Awards categories – and the entertainment business in general – are not observed in independent documentary films, but based on our research there is clearly a long way to go”, Chattoo added.
