How Well Did the Oscars Handle #OscarsSoWhite?

By Alejandro Vasquez on March 5, 2016

The saltiest Oscars in awards show history managed to happen about a week ago, despite being haunted by the #OscarsSoWhite campaign. For those who don’t know, #OscarsSoWhite emerged on social media in response to a lack of racial diversity among nominees, with particular emphasis on the fact that every single contestant across the four acting categories was white. That’s bad enough, but it gets worse: this hashtag actually first popped up for the previous year’s Academy Awards, which also had no people of color (POC) out of a possible twenty in the acting categories. When people realized that this happened yet again, the hashtag really took off.

Jada Pinkett Smith called for a boycott. Spike Lee received an honorary Oscar at a different ceremony and stated, in an Instagram post of a picture of Martin Luther King Jr., that he would not attend. Actors and actresses, both POC (David Oyewolo, Lupita N’yongo) and white (George Clooney, Matt Damon) had some choice words about the situation. Even Donald Trump of all people said, “… it would certainly be nice if everyone could be represented properly.”

Naturally, the Academy had to address this on the actual awards show – anything else would have been suicide. However, I don’t think anyone in the audience expected that the Academy addressing this would be the show. Neil Patrick Harris, the host of last year’s show, reserved his commentary on that topic for a single one-liner in his opening monologue: “Tonight we honor Hollywood’s best and whitest – sorry, brightest.” Chris Rock decided that hosting a show watched by 34 million people worldwide gave him a platform to really cut loose and bring up the issue of race as much as he wanted, and oh boy how he did.

That’s his “getting ready to school prejudiced white people” face.

The first lines of the opening monologue alone showed that these Oscars would be different. Rock, long known for is biting and racially-charged comedy routines, clearly would not hold back that night: “You realize if they nominated hosts, I wouldn’t even get this job!” Throughout those ten minutes, he managed to bring up the terrors that black people faced in the 1960s (“When your grandmother’s swinging from a tree, it’s hard to care about Best Documentary Foreign Short”) and the present (“In the In Memoriam package, it’s just going to be black people that were shot by the cops on the way to the movies”), and he dared to ask the big question of whether or not Hollywood is racist – and concluded that it is “sorority-racist” in its lack of inclusiveness.

This is not to say that Rock was exclusively on the side of people who use the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag. He made sure to poke fun at people boycotting the Oscars, seeing it as self-indulgent and trifling in comparison to other racial issues. He also stated, in summation of a monologue that will go down in entertainment history, “It’s not about boycotting anything. It’s just, we want opportunity. We want black actors to have the same opportunities as white actors.” He did not excuse the Academy’s troubling decisions, and he did not solve the problem, either, but he confronted it.

The rest of the night was packed with skits that lampooned and critiqued the “sorority racism” of the Oscars. One brief segment, “Black History Month Minute,” featured Angela Bassett honoring the “groundbreaking performances” of Jack Black. In “Black Actors in White Roles,” Chris Rock takes Matt Damon’s place in The Martian and suddenly NASA is far less interested in spending the money to bring him home. Rock also brought back his man-on-the-street segment from the last time he hosted the show and interviewed average black citizens of Compton about racial representation in Hollywood, a critically lauded highlight of the night. At the end of the show, the host even signed off by shouting, “Black lives matter!”

Oh yeah, and there was Stacey Dash. Let’s relive that here and never again)

Finally, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the president of the Academy (and a woman and POC), took the stage to announce that measures were being taken to increase diversity among voting members over the next several years, in race, gender, age, and sexuality. Between this and all the African-American presenters who made their own comments, Chris Rock and the organizers of the ceremony made sure to not only point out the Academy’s errors, but also take steps toward preventing this from happening again.

That said, were the Oscars perfect in how they handled race? Heck, is anything? Many commentators have noted that while Chris Rock spoke up about the absence of black people among the year’s nominees, there was little mention of other minorities. Beyond Mexican director’s Alejandro G. Inarritu’s comment about the conflict being “not only about black and white people,” and one Compton interviewee mentioning the need for more Hispanics and Asians in film, other racial minorities were largely kept out of the dialogue.

Most disheartening were the moments when Asians were actually used as the butt of jokes. Sacha Baron Cohen, in his Ali G persona, pulled a bait-and-switch joke when he complained that no nominations were given to “those hard-working yellow people with tiny dongs. You know – the Minions.” Later on, Chris Rock introduced three Asian children in suits as accountants from the firm that handles Oscar votes. Get it? Because Asians are hard workers who are smart at math? And to cap it off, as explained in this video that must be seen to be believed, he followed this up with a joke about child labor in Asian sweatshops.

Seriously, who approved this?

Racial underrepresentation in Hollywood is not exclusively between white and black people. There are far less Hispanic and Asian heroes in our cinema than black and, of course, white heroes. The stories we tell each other define what is normal in our culture, and the most widely-known stories in modern America are often films. If minorities – of all types, not just racial – don’t see themselves in these stories, or don’t see themselves being recognized by awards shows as culturally significant as the Oscars, then we come to see ourselves as outside of society, as “not normal.” It hurts to see a lack of Hispanic representation up there, though I am pleased to see Inarritu win Best Director two years in a row and Chile win its first Best Foreign Film award. And man, I cannot imagine how much it must suck to watch this show as an Asian.

All this is why the #OscarsSoWhite controversy matters, and all this is why the way that Rock and the Academy responded to the controversy was so crucial to the show’s success. In my opinion, though the response was unfortunately pretty flawed, it was also bold, mostly funny, and overall pretty well done. At the very least, it was much better than it could have been.

Here’s hoping next year’s Oscars show some improvement in their diversity. In the meantime, we can celebrate that, after literal decades of being snubbed time and time again, they finally gave a well-deserved Oscar to Ennio Morricone.

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