Recapping the 2016 Oscars

I guess Chris Rock dropped a lot of truth bombs at last night's Academy Awards, but I didn't find his monologue especially incisive or entertaining. Let's see what others are saying:

“Is that the first ‘rape, lynch’ joke by a host in Oscars history?”: Twitter loses it over Chris Rock’s Oscars monologue and #OscarsSoWhite

Chris Rock’s Oscars monologue stuns: “When your grandmother’s swinging from a tree it’s really hard to care about best documentary foreign short”

So the point of his lynching comment was what...that diversity in movies is a trivial issue? "All you movie protesters don't understand what really matters, so shut up"? That's the way I heard it.

What if your short documentary was about grandmothers swinging from a tree? Or about war, climate change, disease, or another important issue? Should the host of an arts program really be dismissing the arts?

Someone wrote that Rock was trying to thread the needle, but they didn't say exactly how. It was by dismissing or belittling the protests and congratulating the people like him who showed up.

Hence the diss of Jada Pinkett Smith--that she wouldn't have been invited anyway. And the "Black History Month Minute" that seemed to honor Will Smith but switched to Jack Black.

The rest of the show

“This Oscar is going home in a Honda Civic”: Louis C.K. steals the show with a real tribute to an unloved category

I agree: Louis CK stole the show. Make him the host next year!

And the winning short documentary was about honor killing, Chris Rock. So yes, short docs can be as relevant to the world as someone's lynching. In this case, they're roughly about the same subject: heinous but quasi-legal murder.

VP Joe Biden speaks out at Oscars against sexual abuse: “We must and we can change the culture”

Yep, one of the night's best moments.

Finally:

Leo earned his Oscar for “The Revenant”—and he might be our greatest movie star ever

Or not:

Leo’s Oscar isn’t overdue: He hasn’t won before because he didn’t earn it

For more on the subject, see Facebooking the 2016 Oscars and Duane Howard at the Oscars.