Chris Rock wanted to “solve the problem” of Hollywood’s lack of diversity by visiting his local cinema.
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Following this year’s ceremony, DiCaprio himself spoke about how he wanted to work as an actor since he was a small child.
Variety’s Brian Lowry said Rock “brilliantly threaded the needle with his opening monologue”. “We [were] too busy being raped and lynched to care about who won best cinematographer”.
But the white producers, directors, casting agents and writers in the Hollywood and Highland Center auditorium audience last night, who laughed with awkward enthusiasm at Chris Rock’s punchlines need to also be called out and held accountable in the same way as the Academy. Robert De Niro never said, ‘I better slow this acting down so Meryl Streep can catch up.’ No. Not at all man. If you want black people every year at the Oscars just have black categories, like ‘best black friend.’ And the victor, for the 18th year in a row, is Wanda Sykes.
While you might have missed it while getting all misty-eyed while Leo was giving his speech – in which the Academy didn’t turn on the music – you may have missed him subtly flipping the bird. “For me, to be able to sit there and not only talk about the film but also something that I’ve been dually as obsessed with-and that’s our environment and climate change-on a platform to hundreds of millions of people that are watching this”. Also in the video, he expressed his happiness to see Leo grab his first award, a sentiment shared by many stars, including Kanye West.
All right now that we got the more serious part of this monologue out of the way, let’s go back to some more comedy. In one, Rock himself was an astronaut left up on Mars, a la Matt Damon in “The Martian”. Say ’62 or ’63, and black people did not protest. Why? Rock transformed the 2016 edition of this glittering awards show into a 3 ½ hour live performance punctuated by political satire riffing on issues of diversity and inclusion and the “Black Lives Matter” movement.
After five nominations, Leonardo DiCaprio finally got his Oscar.
And, the leader of “The Revenant”, Alejandro González Iñárritu won the Oscar for best directing. But we had better things to protest.
“This will be the last night of an all-white Oscars”, Sharpton said.
“You get mad that Will was this good and didn’t get nominated [for his role in “Concussion”]”.
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I wonder what the demographic of the writing staff, technical team, backstage crew and other behind the scenes support was.
