Last night was the biggest annual event in the film industry — the Academy Awards, otherwise known as the Oscars. While controversy is nothing new to awards season, this year’s show was prefaced by a months-long Twitter campaign against the Academy encapsulated by the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite. Despite incredible performances and productions by people of color across subject and title, not a single non-white person entered the Dolby Theatre as a 2016 acting nominee last night. Going into the show, the question on just about everyone’s mind was this: how would the host, Chris Rock, address the controversy and the large implications Oscars whitewashing makes about Hollywood? The answer became clear within minutes of the broadcast’s beginning — Rock was going to hold no punches.
His critical, biting look at race relations in Hollywood is exactly what the Academy and the 34 million people watching the Oscars needed to hear. Overall, his remarks validated and strengthened the #OscarsSoWhite campaign and its underlying issue of representation in the media. While it is easy to look at police brutality and hate speech and recognize them as racist, the kind of racism responsible for inadequate and unfair media representation is of a much more sinister and subtle sort. Rock highlighted this during the awards, snarking that, “Hollywood is racist... But it ain’t that racism that you’ve grown accustomed to. Hollywood is sorority racist.” Rock was pointing out that while it is all smiles and apologies and rationalizations, the end result is still the denial of opportunities to and recognition of people of color.
Representation is crucial to shifting sociocultural norms from one paradigm to another, to actually equalizing the playing field; what we see on TV as both children and adults is, to an extent, what we expect to see in reality. If there are no people of color on the screen, then our subconsciouses are taught to see non-white individuals as abnormal, as the philosophical and cultural “Other.” We as a country both need and deserve popular media that accurately reflects the tapestry of diversity in the United States, that shows how many different ways there are to be “normal” and happy and successful.
Rock’s performance as a host emphasized the cruciality of fair representation and recognition, while contextualizing these issues within the larger scheme of structural racism against African-Americans in U.S. society. He referenced the astounding number of African-Americans who are shot each year by police forces, sardonically joking that, “This year, in the In Memoriam package, it’s just going to be black people that were shot by the cops on their way to the movies.”
Not all of his remarks, however, came across as validating to the #OscarsSoWhite campaign. Many on Twitter were upset at his saying that African-Americans did not protest the racism within the Oscars during the 1950s and 1960s because they had “real things to protest at the time,” noting that African-Americans were “too busy being raped and lynched to care about who won best cinematographer.” Yet, placing that quote in context with his other comments regarding the treatment of African-Americans in our society and the various forms in which racism manifests, it is clear that Rock did not intend to trivialize the struggles faced by many African-Americans today. More than anything, I interpreted that comment as a chilling reminder of the horrors that were still normalized within American culture only a few decades ago. Rock was reminding us as viewers that the Academy, and the elite cohort of American society which it tends to represent, is not that far removed from the civil rights era and the violence that necessitated it.
Where Rock did misstep, however, was in his stunning failure to use this platform to promote an intersectional voice. In the middle of the broadcast, Rock joked about switching out the typical Oscar tabulating firm Pricewaterhouse Cooper for more competent employees — and then proceeded to parade three Asian American children onto the stage.
He moved on by quipping that if people were offended or upset by that particular bit, they should “just tweet about it on [their] phone, which was also made by these kids.” The former joke perpetuates a blatantly uncouth stereotype that harms the self-perception of many Asian-American individuals, and the latter makes light of child labor. Alternatively, if Rock meant that to be a jab at the hypocrisy of people complaining about racist jokes while supporting the marginalization of workers in developing countries, he could have made that point without prefacing it with an unfunny, outdated and stereotypical joke.
Overall, I was very impressed and pleased with Rock’s performance as the Oscar host. He managed to navigate the minefield of controversy before him with grace, humor and wit, while reminding the viewership of the very real issues regarding race in the film industry. Here is to hoping that next year, history will not repeat itself.
Correction appended (March 1, 2016):
This article was incorrectly posted online. Originally, the text of Dorothy Qu's column "I'm Not Racist...But" was published instead of Emily Albrecht's piece. This error has been corrected.
