Review: Rock rips into racism in Oscars monologue

This year the Oscar folks knew what was coming — and knew they had it coming.

After all, give a comic as sharp and smart as Chris Rock a target like this year’s all-white slate of acting nominees, and surely everyone in the audience for Sunday’s Academy Awards had to realize he’d hit it and hit it hard. Oscar voters may even have been hoping he would: This was their shot at a ritual cleansing, or flogging — a kind of mass penitential rite.

If that is indeed what they wished for, boy, did they get it.

And right from the start, too. Rock walked out after the opening montage of the ABC broadcast and laced right into the issue. “I counted at least 15 black people on that montage. I’m here at the Academy Awards, otherwise known as the White People’s Choice awards. If they nominated hosts, I wouldn’t even get this job.”

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The tone was nothing new: Rock was almost equally dismissive of the event when he hosted in 2005, in a way that seemed out of sync with the occasion and the mood in the room. This time, however, he was perfectly attuned with the times.

Anyone thinking Rock would slam the Academy’s voters alone probably has never listened to Rock’s stand-up: He looks for multiple sides of an issue, and multiple ways to make everyone uncomfortable. So he made fun of the protesters as well, pointing out that African-Americans didn't protest similar “white-outs” in the ‘60s, because they were “too busy being raped and lynched to care about who won best cinematographer.”

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Even from home, you could tell there were people in that room applauding that joke who had clearly missed the point — or were just hoping they were off the hook. They weren’t; spreading the blame to both sides does not mean you're equating both sides, or excusing either side.

If he was, he would not have gone on to flat-out call Hollywood “racist.” Or to say that the entire "In Memoriam" segment would consist of “just black people who were shot by the cops on their way to the movies."

Funny. Pointed. Gasp-inducing.

And they had it coming.