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How will #OscarsSoWhite affect this year's Academy Awards?

Academy Awards show, increasingly out of sync with the network that airs it, may need this year’s host more than usual.

Chris Rock is back to host.
Chris Rock is back to host.Read more

There couldn't be a better or a worse time for Chris Rock to be hosting the Oscars.

The timing is good for ABC. The network has made diversity part of its brand, with shows like Scandal, Black-ish, How to Get Away With Murder, American Crime, and Fresh Off the Boat. This month, it promoted Channing Dungey to entertainment president, making her the first African American to head a major broadcast network.

Airing an Academy Awards show where, for the second year in a row, all the acting nominees are white? That's so not the look ABC could have been aiming for.

Philadelphia's Will Smith won't be there, and neither will Spike Lee, who received an honorary Oscar in November. Directors Ryan Coogler (Creed) and Ava DuVernay (Selma) plan to spend Oscar night in Flint, Mich., at a benefit for residents dealing with the lead contamination of their tap water.

So Rock's presence, along with those of presenters including Oscar winners Whoopi Goldberg, Louis Gossett Jr., and Morgan Freeman, could help the network.

Philadelphia's own Kevin Hart is also expected to present, and so are Common and Penn grad John Legend, who shared the Oscar for original song last year. Michael B. Jordan, whose performance in Creed didn't get nominated, while Sylvester Stallone's did, is also scheduled to be a presenter.

What's not so good about that, beyond the sight of people of color supplying glitz, entertainment, and credibility for an awards show where they won't be accepting anything but applause, is that it could paper over concerns that, although television seems finally to be moving forward, the industry the Oscars celebrate could be going the other way.

In 2005, when Rock last hosted, Ray was in the running for best picture. Jamie Foxx (Ray) and Don Cheadle (Hotel Rwanda) were up for best actor. Freeman, Foxx (Collateral), and Sophie Okonedo (Hotel Rwanda) were nominated in supporting categories. So even before Foxx won for Ray and Freeman for Million Dollar Baby, no one was worrying about a boycott, or an avalanche of #OscarsSoWhite tweets (and not just because the launch of Twitter was more than a year away).

Will the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' efforts to increase the diversity of its membership allow us to continue to take the Oscars more seriously than we do the Golden Globes? ABC had better hope so, because the Globes, whose winners are chosen by the fringe-y Hollywood Foreign Press Association, is already the more entertaining show.

But changing the voters without changing the industry they're drawn from may not mean much if potential best pictures don't get made, much less nominated.

Television's far from a perfect business, but it is a business, and in showcasing actors like Scandal's Kerry Washington, Empire's Taraji P. Henson and Terrence Howard, Superstore's America Ferrera, Power's Omari Hardwick, Fresh Off the Boat's Constance Wu and Randall Park, and How to Get Away With Murder's Viola Davis, it's coming to realize that the lives of people of all colors matter to the bottom line, too.

Hosting the Oscars has become almost as hard as changing them - not even 2012 host Billy Crystal could live up to our memories of Billy Crystal - but the person who could benefit most from the latest nominations controversy is nevertheless Rock.

In 2005, the comedian, expected to shake things up at the pretty much unshakable Oscars, barely registered on the entertainment Richter scale.

As I wrote at the time, "one of the most pointed performers in the industry couldn't seem to get to one . . . beginning with a rambling monologue that touched on the difference between stars and lesser lights ('Clint Eastwood is a star . . . Tobey Maguire is a boy in tights'), questioned the current omnipresence of Jude Law, and elaborated on his own reverence for Russell Crowe.

"Since of those actors only Eastwood was nominated this year - or even appeared to be in the Kodak Theatre - this wasn't exactly the take-no-prisoners approach we'd been led to expect."

In a pretaped piece, Rock had also looked at the gap between what black moviegoers liked and what got nominated, but an Oscars show with a record number of acting nominations for black actors might not have been the best place to make that point.

This year, the comedian who once dubbed the Academy Awards "the Million White Man March" might not feel the need to pull any punches. Or take any prisoners.

graye@phillynews.com
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