Chris Rocks

This guy. :-) 

So what did I think of Chris Rock's monologue at the Oscars, even though I didn't watch anything else on the Academy Awards?   The funniest man of my generation couldn't have said it any better about lack of diversity in the Oscars.  He said that boycotting the awards wasn't as important as providing more opportunity for black actors to excel at the same sort of movies white actors routinely get cast in.  There was no malice and no hostility in Rock's monologue but plenty of good jabs at the lack of diversity in the movies and the cluelessness of white studio executives, and he took some lighthearted jabs at the reality of the situation.  I slightly disagreed with Rock, though, on the lack of believability of the Rocky movies, showing a white boxer being the athletic equal to black boxers. Rocky Balboa, like the actor who plays him, Sylvester Stallone (who found Rock's joke about Rocky being less believable than Star Wars funny, actually) is Italian-American, land Italian-American boxers like Rocky Marciano (a real Rocky) are the stuff of legend.  It's just that Americans of Italian origin haven't had a Marciano to root for in ages; Italian-Americans haven't dominated boxing since the 1950s.

As for the awards themselves . . . two things stood out for me.  Leonardo DiCaprio hadn't won an Oscar but still had been nominated over the years, and this year it looked like he would be continued to be shut out like Paul Newman, to whom I've compared DiCaprio for his liberal activism and his popularity with the ladies, had always been before winning for The Color of Money.  DiCaprio did win this year, for Best Actor in The Revenant, about the wild frontier.  I think it's safe to say that the former TV child actor (he stared in the Alan Thicke sitcom "Growing Pains") is a Hollywood institution now.

I'm also glad that Spotlight, about the Boston Globe's investigation of the Boston Catholic Archdiocese for priests abusing children, won Best Picture.  I haven't seen it yet, but I want to - any movie that casts reporters in a positive light is a movie I want to see.  Such movies make it loud and clear that we need two things in this country - freedom of the press, and more of it. 

Chris Rock makes me glad we have freedom of speech. :-)