Variety Reports:
Chris Rock’s scathing and well-crafted monologue at Sunday’s Oscar Show was entertaining, but it made some serious points.
“Is Hollywood racist?” he asked at the mid-point of his withering monologue, which had the audience laughing and occasionally cringing as well. It’s not “cross-burning racist,” he acknowledged.
He recalled meeting President Obama at a Hollywood fundraiser, where Rock was one of only a few black attendees. In the few seconds he had with the President during a photo op, Rock quickly sketched out the slippery yet pervasive racism that pervades the entertainment industry.
“You see all these writers, producers and actors?” Rock remembered asking the president. “They don’t hire black people — and they’re the nicest people on earth. They’re liberals!”
The In Memoriam segment this year, he joked, would be a montage of black people shot by cops on their way to the movies. Amid the awkward laughter there were some “oohs,” but Rock, a skilled stand-up comic of remarkable dexterity, wasn’t fazed.
In a less successful part of his monologue, he riffed on Jada Pinkett Smith’s boycott of the Oscars, noting that she’s more known for her TV work than her film roles of late.
Pinkett Smith staying away from the ceremony would be like “me boycotting Rihanna’s panties. I wasn’t invited,” Rock said.
The crass, unpleasant joke didn’t quite land, nor did a rather tired joke at the end of his monologue about how actresses are protesting the superficial questions they’re typically asked on red carpets. His mockery of “Ask her more” seemed out of place in a monologue that otherwise asked pointed questions about Hollywood’s systematic biases.
“Everything’s not sexism, everything’s not racism!” Rock said, but it was hard not to wish he’d trained a little of the firepower he brought to the topic of race on the hurdles faced by actresses in a town with a long history of gender bias.
But Rock was there to riff on how white Hollywood is, and on that topic, he was remarkably effective, which was no surprise (and those jokes were reinforced by some effective pre-taped segments starring previous Oscar host Whoopi Goldberg).
There may not have been many protests like #OscarsSoWhite in the sixties, as he noted, “When you’re grandmother’s swinging from a tree, it’s really hard to care about best documentary foreign short,” but it’s not likely that anyone will forget about the issues of inclusion and bias in the coming year. Or will they?
Whatever happens in the Oscar race this year, as Rock noted, it’s quite likely that Leonardo DiCaprio will get another great role in this year, and next year, and the year after that. Jamie Foxx and other black actors aren’t likely to be as lucky.
“We want opportunity,” Rock said. “We want black actors to get the same opportunities as white actors, that’s it.”
