Everyone knew that Oscars host Chris Rock, after six weeks of silence on the issue, was going to address the #OscarsSoWhite controversy during his monologue Sunday night.
But viewers may not have been prepared for Rock’s double-barreled assault on racism in Hollywood. He explored it head-on, not just in his opening speech but in comments and recorded segments throughout the show.
“Everyone wants to know: Is Hollywood racist? Is it burning-cross racist? No. It’s a different kind of racist,” Rock said Sunday.
“You’re damn right Hollywood’s racist, but not the racist that you’ve grown accustomed to. Hollywood is sorority racist. It’s like, ‘We like you, Rhonda, but you’re not a Kappa.’ That’s how Hollywood is.
“But things are changing,” he added, building up to a joke. “We got a black ‘Rocky’ this year. Some people call it ‘Creed.’ I call it ‘Black Rocky.’
Rock had been widely expected to speak up on the well-documented lack of ethnic and gender diversity in Hollywood after no minorities were nominated in any of the four acting categories for the second consecutive year. The exclusion caused an uproar and led some prominent black celebrities, including actress Jada Pinkett Smith and filmmaker Spike Lee, to skip the show.
Rock said that he himself was urged by some to step down as host in protest.
“I thought about quitting. I thought about it real hard. But they’re not going to cancel the Oscars because I quit. And the last thing I need is to lose another job to Kevin Hart.”
Rock’s monologue alternated between jokes and more serious statements echoing those of black leaders who have called for the movie industry to be more inclusive in hiring and casting minorities.
“It’s not about boycotting. We want opportunities,” Rock said. “We want black actors to get the same opportunities as white actors — that’s it. Not just once.”
Some of Rock’s more pointed jokes drew gasps or stunned silence from the mostly white audience inside Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre.
“This is the 88th Academy Awards. So this whole ‘no black nominees’ thing has happened at least 71 other times.” Rock said black Americans didn’t made a fuss about it back then because they had more important things to worry about.
“We were too busy being raped and lynched to care about who won best cinematographer,” he said. “When your grandmother’s swinging from a tree, it’s really hard to care about best documentary foreign short.”
Rock pushed things even further when he joked that the Oscars telecast would be a little different this year.
“In the In Memoriam package, it’s just going to be black people who were shot by the cops on the way to the movies,” he said, a reference to the recent police shootings in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere that galvanized the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
Reaction online to Rock’s comments — and the racially tinged tenor of the show — was mostly positive.
“Rock’s opening monologue was not only funnier than most in recent memory; it was stinging enough to ricochet through the rest of the evening, as the inevitable cavalcade of white presenters and winners took the mike,” wrote Michael Schulman in The New Yorker.
“This year will be remembered, rightly, for its thorny racial politics and for the way that Rock, probably as well as anyone could, held the industry to account on its biggest night.”
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