I’m here at the Oscars, otherwise known as the White People’s Choice Awards.
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The controversy, which was attached to the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, was immediately taken on by host Chris Rock who opened the show with amusing yet pointed commentary. You have all this controversy…
He then goes on to check out the book on keeping the Oscar “maintained” (this is a thing?) and DiCaprio asks, “What does it need?” while looking at a How-to Oscar guide.
Many who did tune in, though, including those in the hip-hop community, enjoyed much of the Hollywood spectacle, particularly Chris Rock’s job as host and Leo DiCaprio’s big win for his leading role in “The Revenant”, his first golden statue in six nominations and an acting career spanning almost 25 years. Say ’62 or ’63, and black people did not protest. Why? You got to figure that it happened in the ’50s in the ’60s, you know in the ’60s one of those years Sidney [Poitier] didn’t put out a movie. The one saving grace in his rather bland speech was a joke about the In Memoriam segment of the ceremony, which he said was going to honour “black people shot by police” on the way to the movies. But we had better things to protest. When your grandmother is swinging from the tree, it’s really hard to care about Best Documentary Foreign Short.
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FYI: Chris is wearing a Burberry tuxedo, Christian Louboutin shoes, and Martin Katz cuff links. A representative for the organization said in a statement Tuesday that it raised $65,243 – the number Rock showed on stage during the telecast – thanks to a combination of cookie sales and donations. Dash had made headlines, and raised eyebrows, last month when she said Black History Month should be abolished because it promotes racial segregation. That, and the fact that they were each other’s dates to the Oscars on the red carpet earlier that evening, was enough to get us crying into our Titanic VHS tapes. We can recognize that while people of color aren’t necessarily dying from not getting more opportunities in the film industry, the lack of opportunity is symptomatic of institutional racism as a whole.
