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Rock pulls no punches on #OscarsSoWhite

Host skewers Academy voters and boycotters in pointed, funny monologue

The host wore white. As in #OscarsSoWhite.

Chris Rock looked sharp, and he mostly stayed on point Sunday, as he hosted an Academy Awards show for which he proved to be the right man at the right time.

"If they nominated hosts, I wouldn't even get this job. You'd be watching Neil Patrick Harris," Chris Rock said even as he attempted to put the furor over the second consecutive year of all-white acting nominations into perspective.

"It's the 88th Academy Awards. Which means this whole no black nominee thing has happened at least 71 other times," said Rock, noting that "black people did not protest" for most of those years.

"Why? Because we had real things to protest at the time . . . When your grandmother is swinging from a tree, it's really hard to care about best documentary short."

Somewhere, presumably far from the Dolby Theater, Jada Pinkett Smith's ears had to be burning.

"Jada boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna's panties. I wasn't invited," said Rock, who said he'd been urged to quit after the nominations were announced.

"No one with a job ever tells you to quit. I thought about quitting. I thought about it real hard . . . but the last thing I need is to lose another job to Kevin Hart," he said, as the camera zoomed in on Philadelphia's Hart.

"I get it. It's not fair that Will [Smith, star of Concussion] was this good and didn't get nominated. It's also not fair that Will was paid $20 million for Wild Wild West."

But while he distanced himself from the Smiths' boycott, Rock wasn't letting Hollywood, and the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, off the hook.

Not by a long shot.

"Is Hollywood racist? You're damn right it's racist. It's sorority racist," he said. "It's like, 'We like you, Rhonda, but you're not a Kappa,' " said Rock before saying the thing the people inside, and outside, the Dolby most needed to hear.

"We want opportunities. We want black actors to get the same opportunities [as white actors] . . . not just once. Leo [DiCaprio] gets a great part every year," Rock said.

"What about Jamie Foxx?" he asked. Foxx, who won his Oscar in 2005, the last year that Rock hosted, "was so good in Ray that they went to the hospital and unplugged the real Ray Charles."

Later, introducing presenters Rachel McAdams (Spotlight) and Michael B. Jordan (Creed), Rock referred to McAdams as an Oscar nominee and Jordan as "should've-been-nominee."

As always, there were a few performances for which the academy offers no recognition:

Best stunt involving food: Two years ago, host Ellen DeGeneres ordered pizza during the show. Rock brought in Girl Scouts and urged high rollers in the audience to fork over for cookies for his daughters' troop.

Best response to Michael Strahan's do-you-have-any-advice questions: By Upper Darby's Tina Fey, who declined to offer any because "Chris Rock needs no advice from me, because he is the greatest living American stand-up comedian."

Least successful rerun: Rock's pretaped bit with moviegoers in Compton, Calif. which recalled a similar piece he'd done in 2005 whose point seems to be that minority people don't like the same movies the Academy does. Of course, most years, the same could be said for the majority of moviegoers.

graye@phillynews.com

215-854-5950 @elgray

Blog: ph.ly/EllenGray