OscarsSoDiverse

English: Chris rock at the Madagascar 2 premiere in Israel. עברית: כריס רוק בבכורה של מדגסקר 2 בישראל (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

To make up for the glaring fact that the Motion Picture Academy failed to nominate a single person of color in any of its acting categories for the second consecutive year (and for the third time since 2011), the 88th Academy Awards ceremony telecast on ABC (whose parent company, Disney, has had its own history of racial insensitivity) was sprinkled with African-Americans in the audience, as stage presenters and in those movie montages to show how inclusive they are in the face of threatened boycotts.

The host this year was Chris Rock, whose opening monologue succeeded in making anyone in the Dolby Theater audience and those watching on TV who wasn't black uncomfortable with his edgy jokes.  The president of the academy is Cheryl Boone Isaacs.  The Oscar telecast had bent over backwards so much to show how diverse they were that it felt patronizing to watch, given that this came on the next-to-last day of Black History Month..

Those who took home the silver statuettes Sunday certainly deserved their honors.  But it is also instructive to know that African-Americans have waited a long time to take home Oscar themselves.

"Spotlight", a film about the making of the Boston Globe's newspaper investigation into a child sexual abuse scandal involving Catholic priests, was the surprise choice for Best Picture.  "Twelve Years a Slave" won the honor in 2013.

Leonardo DiCaprio, who was mauled by a bear in his role in "The Revenant", won for Best Actor.  Though it was pretty much a lifetime achievement award for all the roles he was nominated for (and lost), DiCaprio used his acceptance speech to call attention to the threat of climate change.  Forest Whitaker won the award for "The Last King of Scotland" in 2006.

Alejandro G. Inarritu won a second consecutive Best Director Oscar for "The Revenant".  An African-American has yet to win in this category.

The Best Actress Oscar went to Brie Larson for her role in "Room".  Halle Berry was the first (and so far only) African-American to receive this honor in 2001 for "Monster's Ball".

Mark Rylance won his Best Supporting Actor award for "Bridge of Spies", beating out Sylvester Stallone, who reprised his Rocky Balboa character in "Creed", which was about an African-American boxer.  Morgan Freeman, who won this award for "Million Dollar Baby" (also about boxing) in 2004, returned this year to announce "Spotlight" as Best Picture.

The Best Supporting Actress Oscar went to Alicia Vikander for her role in "The Danish Girl".  Lupita Nyong'o also won in this category for "Twelve Years a Slave".  Hattie McDaniel was the first African-American to win an Oscar of any kind in 1939, playing a servant in "Gone With The Wind".

Among other things . . .

• Current Awards Show Diva Lady Gaga nailed it with her angry performance of "Til It happens to You" from "The Hunting Ground", a film about campus sexual violence.  She lost the Best Original Song Oscar to Sam Smith, who performed yet another theme to yet another James Bond movie.  Smith dedicated his award to the LGBT community, of which he says he's a member.
• "Mad Max: Fury Road" won most of the technical awards (six), proving that the Academy can reward apocalyptic science fiction movies as long as there isn't any acting involved.
• The Thank You scroll that rolled along the bottom of your TV screen as if this were ESPN or CNN, was intended to spare us from some Oscar winners' interminable laundry list of them thanking God and their agents.  It backfired because some of them still insisted on thanking people verbally from the stage, before the orchestra serenaded them off.
• This year's Academy Awards telecast was seen by 34.5 million viewers, the lowest number in six years.  Would it be too much to ask if they could move the announcement of the major awards to an earlier hour?  Like sometime before midnight in the East and Midwest?

While this year's awards ceremony was a knee-jerk reaction to the Motion Picture Academy's lack of diversity, it is only part of the problem,  As long as Hollywood is run mostly by white men who see the success or failure of a project not in terms of black or white, but in how much green they can make, women and people of color will continue to find it difficult to succeed in show business.  And that will continue to be reflected every time the Oscar nominations are announced.