“Is Hollywood racist? You’re damn right it’s racist but it’s sorority racist, like ‘We like you, Ronda, but you’re not a Kappa'”.
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He followed that by welcoming everyone to the 88th Academy Awards, “also known as the white people’s choice awards”, Rock said. Leonardo DiCapro and his The Revenant film director Alejandro G. Irritu bagged the best actor and best director award as Brie Larson triumphed over the other contenders to take home the best actress award while Spotlight was named the best picture in the 2016 Oscars. Dystopian blockbuster Mad Max: Fury Road swept the technical categories, scoring trophies for Costume Design, Production Design, Makeup and Hairstyling, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, and Film Editing.
“I feel so overwhelmed with gratitude for what happened tonight, but I feel there is a ticking clock out there” demanding action, he said.
Leonardo DiCaprio, the forgone best-actor victor for “The Revenant”, used the platform to talk about his life’s passion outside of acting – climate change, which got a “thank you” from the official White House Instagram account.
Swedish actress Alicia Vikander won the supporting actress Oscar for transgender movie The Danish Girl while documentary Amy, about the late and troubled British pop star Amy Winehouse was also a victor.
With the first pair of awards out of the way, Rock returned to harp on the diversity issue once again, playing an entertaining video package that superimposed black characters into this year’s nominated films, like Whoopi Goldberg mopping a floor in “Joy”, Rock as the astronaut in “The Martian” and Leslie Jones as the bear mauling Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Revenant”.
But the wins at times felt secondary to the sharp, unflinching host. “You realise if they nominated hosts, I wouldn’t even get this job”. The supporting actor win for Mark Rylance over Sylvester Stallone drew gasps.
Chile’s “Bear Story” won for Best Animated Short, marking the first Oscar for a film from the country, while Best Animated Feature landed closer to home, with the award going to “Inside Out”, marking a return to form for Disney’s Pixar, which hadn’t won an Oscar since 2012’s “Brave”.
The acting nominees restored “OscarsSoWhite” to prominence and led Spike Lee (an honorary Oscar victor this year) and Jada Pinkett Smith to announce that they wouldn’t attend the show. Hungary’s concentration camp drama “Son of Saul” won best foreign language film.
Meanwhile, Whoopi Goldberg kept up the race discussion in a skit imagining more black actors on screen. Some people call it Creed, but I call it Black Rocky.
In her remarks during the show, Boone Isaacs strongly defended the changes, quoting Martin Luther King Jr. and urging each Oscar attendee to bring greater opportunity to the industry. Last year’s telecast, hosted by Neil Patrick Harris, slid 16 percent to 36.6 million viewers, a six-year low.
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How the controversy will affect ratings for ABC is also one of the night’s big questions.
