Eleven years ago, the film academy considered itself quite daring when it asked Chris Rock to host the Oscars.

The first black man to preside solo over the festivities, Rock would, it was hoped, bring a younger, hipper, more urban audience to the telecast, perhaps tighten up its sagging ratings, make it seem a bit less calcified.

OSCARS 2016: Full coverage | List of winners | Read Chris Rock’s 2016 Oscars opening monologue | #OscarsSoWhite controversy

Unapologetically outspoken about his disinterest in the show — “They don’t honor comedy and there aren’t a lot of black people,” he said at the time, “so why would I watch?” — Rock was, in the parlance of the Oscaratti, a “risky” choice.


A bit too risky, as it turned out, at least for many. His monologue began with a joke about how unusual it was to have four black nominees, and it included a rant about how movies for black people didn’t even get real names (“‘Barbershop.’ That’s not a name; that’s just a location.”) He pointed out the academy’s ivory tower problem by asking Magic Johnson Theatres patrons to name their best movie of the year. “White Chicks” got a lot of traction.

VIDEO: The five best lines from Chris Rock’s Oscars monologue >>

Some people laughed, but many more squirmed. Hollywood, like an overconfident doyenne whose cleverly cast dinner party unexpectedly becomes a bit too real, responded with a frozen smile. It was immediately, and correctly, assumed that Rock would not be asked back.

Until now.


Depending on your level of cynicism, this year’s choice of Rock to host the Oscars feels divinely inspired or like a very smart preemptive move.

Long before the nominations were announced, it was clear that, once again, most of the Oscar hopefuls revolved around white folks and their issues. Still, the complete absence of nonwhite nominees in the acting categories for a second year in a row provoked protest, calls for a boycott and a swift pledge by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to broaden its membership.

1 / 54 The cast of Best Picture winner “Spotlight” takes a selfie backstage at the 88th Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times) 2 / 54 Director Tom McCarthy with the Oscar for best picture, “Spotlight.” (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 3 / 54 Actress Stacey Dash speaks onstage during the 88th Annual Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre on Feb. 28, 2016. (Kevin Winter / Getty Images) 4 / 54 Michael Keaton and the cast and producers of “Spotlight” celebrate after winning the Oscar for best picture. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 5 / 54 The production team and cast of Spotlight celebrate the award for best picture. (Mark Ralston / AFP/Getty Images) 6 / 54 Leonardo DiCaprio (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 7 / 54 Brie Larson (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 8 / 54 Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, winner of Best Director with Tom Hardy (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 9 / 54 Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 10 / 54 Lady Gaga performs (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 11 / 54 Lady Gaga and abuse survivors (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 12 / 54 Daisy Ridley and Dev Patel (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 13 / 54 Vice President Joe Biden (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 14 / 54 Director Laszlo Nemes (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 15 / 54 Chris Rock and Girl Scouts (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 16 / 54 Dave Grohl during the In Memoriam segment (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 17 / 54 Whoopi Goldberg (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 18 / 54 Kate Winslet and Reese Witherspoon (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 19 / 54 Kate Winslet and Reese Witherspoon (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 20 / 54 Chris Rock (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 21 / 54 Asif Kapadia and James Gay-Rees (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 22 / 54 Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 23 / 54 Louis C.K. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 24 / 54 Chris Rock (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 25 / 54 Mark Rylance (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 26 / 54 Mark Rylance thanks Steven Spielberg before accepting his Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 27 / 54 Patricia Arquette (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 28 / 54 Filmmakers Pato Escala Pierart and Gabriel Osorio Vargas (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 29 / 54 The Weeknd performs (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 30 / 54 The Weeknd performs (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 31 / 54 The Weeknd performs (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 32 / 54 Jonas Rivera and Pete Docter (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 33 / 54 Girl Scouts sell cookies with Chris Rock (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 34 / 54 David White, right, and Mark Mangini (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 35 / 54 Marcos Taylor as Suge Knight (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 36 / 54 Rachel McAdams and Michael B. Jordan (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 37 / 54 Emmanuel Lubezki (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 38 / 54 Priyanka Chopra, left, and Liev Schreiber (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 39 / 54 Margaret Sixel (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 40 / 54 Chris Evans, right, and Chadwick Boseman (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 41 / 54 Benecio del Toro and Jennifer Garner (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 42 / 54 Elka Warden, Lesley Vanderwalt and Damian Martin (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 43 / 54 Presenters Margot Robbie and Jared Leto (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 44 / 54 Colin Gibson and Lisa Thompson (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 45 / 54 Cate Blanchett (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 46 / 54 Tina Fey and Steve Carell (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 47 / 54 CaJenny Beavan (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 48 / 54 Alicia Vikander (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 49 / 54 Adam McKay, front, and Charles Randolph with their Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 50 / 54 Sam Smith (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 51 / 54 Sarah Silverman (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 52 / 54 “The Big Short,” the anarchic, bracing broadside against Wall Street malfeasance, won the adapted screenplay Oscar at tonight’s 88th Academy Awards. The script was written by Charles Randolph and Adam McKay, who also directed. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 53 / 54 Emily Blunt and Charlize Theron (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 54 / 54 Chris Rock (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

The Oscars, instead of being preceded by the traditional round of self-involved concerns over ratings and relevance, found itself in the middle of a larger, and scarier, conversation about race.


Suddenly Rock became the man of the moment, not as the titillating provocateur, but as veteran truth-teller. Virtually overnight, he was moved off those Worst Hosts Ever lists to become A Man Ahead of His Time.

Everyone gets the Magic Johnson Theatres joke now, Chris. And “White Chicks”? That really was a great movie!

This year, no one needs Rock to shake things up; they need him to spell things out. “Rock has been outspoken about the issue for years” has become all but boilerplate in the multimedia musings over how he’s going to handle the evening.

It is certainly possible that he will briefly acknowledge the “elephant in the room” before asking it to leave, as academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs did at the Oscar luncheon, just as it is possible that he will bring an actual elephant onto the stage and keep it there for the duration of the show (I double-dog dare you, man).


But many believe he will somehow salvage the moment. That, with the benefit of comedy and his new status as social arbiter Rock will be able to make some sort of definitive statement that acknowledges the problem and the anger it has sparked, while still celebrating those nominated in the year that #OscarsSoWhite dominated the season’s news cycle.

Fortunately this year, he won’t be speaking into a vacuum; if the Dolby Theatre audience is prepared for pointed commentary about race, the 40 million or so people expected to be watching on television are even more so. Especially fans of ABC, the network airing the Oscars, which Rock has called in promos “the only ABC show that Shonda Rhimes doesn’t own. Yet.”

Television — as every media outlet in the country has been pointing out for a while — though still overwhelmingly white and male, has been covering far more demographic ground of late than film.

Years after Rhimes demanded that casting directors stop sending her only white actors for the roles in “Grey’s Anatomy,” shows as disparate as “Sleepy Hollow” and “Chicago Med” include main characters of every race and background; Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black” alone has more women of color in main roles than all of this year’s films put together.


More important, many of these shows, including “Orange”; ABC’s “black-ish,” “How to Get Away With Murder” and “American Crime”; Fox’s “Empire”; NBC’s “The Carmichael Show”; and now FX’s “The People v. O.J. Simpson,” address issues of racism, and other forms of exclusion and oppression, with a directness mostly absent from TV since the days of Norman Lear.

An upcoming episode of the returning comedy “The Carmichael Show” deals with its black family’s conflicting feelings about Bill Cosby. Days before the Oscar telecast, “black-ish” dealt with the grim realities of raising black children in a country where police brutality is still too common and often unpunished.

Chris Rock’s pointed monologue in his first time as Oscars host caused discomfort in 2005. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

Racism, among law enforcement and ordinary citizens, drove the first season of “American Crime” just as it obviously drives “The People v O.J. Simpson,” which, when not falling prey to the same queasy distractions of celebrity and personality politics that plagued the actual trial, illustrates in chilling detail how racism corrupts the justice system in every way at every level.


Or as Anthony Anderson’s Dre says in “black-ish:” “We were so desperate for a win we had to root for that jerk.”

So that’s how much time has passed, and that’s how much things have changed — and stayed the same. The Oscars are still so white, but a broadcast comedy can land a joke about the racial backlash that fueled the Trial of the Century.

Chris Rock really is the perfect choice, and as long as he doesn’t pretend that the elephant is imaginary, he’s going to be just fine.

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91% white. 76% male. Changing who votes on the Oscars won’t be easy