Oh, Hollywood, you're racist and you don't even know it!
That was the undercurrent of post-Oscars analysis delivered by Chris Hayes and panelists on the Monday, February 23 edition of All In. From emcee Neil Patrick Harris's opening joke to a running bit with Octavia Spencer to Sean Penn's "green card" joke, the faculty-lounge lefties assembled on set lectured the Academy Awards for being too white and too insensitive to persons of color.
"Tonight we honor Hollywood's best and whitest -- sorry, brightest," was Harris's joke. That fact that it wasn't followed by a more searing satire of racial underrepresentation at the Oscars was a shame, panel member Rembert Brown of Grantland insisted.
"I'm pro that joke if it doesn't turn into a terrible ceremony after that," Brown groused. "I thought it was going to set up like a commentary-feel thing, but what happened after that was, made that whole joke like, feel very shortsighted."
"Like, we got it out of the way kind of thing," Hayes added in agreement. Indeed, "the structural planned events did not further address race" with the exception of Oscar-nominated original song "Glory," from the Selma soundtrack, New Republic senior editor Rebecca Traister -- a white liberal woman -- noted.
"It was noticeable how diverse the presenters were," Hayes added moments later. "It's like, OK, I see you guys, i see what we're trying to do here, and like, OK, cool, but then also, is this just packaging?"
At this point, Traister chimed in with her denunciation of a running gag through the show where Harris, the emcee, had entrusted actress Octavia Spencer, who happens to be black, with keeping her eye on a transparent, locked box with a briefcase enclosed therein -- a briefcase supposed to contain Harris's pre-ceremony Oscar predictions.
Traister complained that not only did the bit "fall flat" but that it was "terrible" the manner in which Spencer was used. Hayes then chimed in:
Neil Patrick Harris all but handed her a broom! The subtext of the bit was like, can you be my helped, the way you would to like a toddler, basically.
At this point, panelist Jason Bailey of Flavorwire insisted the Spencer bit was a "weird metaphor" for how "Hollywood thinks it thinks about racism."
"I'm also going to do this sort of racist bit and not realize that I'm being sort of racist," Bailey noted.
Grantland's Rembert Brown then raised Sean Penn's "green card joke" about his friend, Mexican-born Alejandro González Iñárritu. Admitting there was a "backstory" to the joke, it struck him as offensive to essentially say, well, "I'm going to make a little funny racist jab, but it's fine 'cuz we're all friends here."
"Obviously, we're Hollywood," Hayes chimed in, adding "there's this kind of idea" that Hollywood liberals "can't possibly be racist because we are Hollywood."
While Hayes may be on to something, a little bit at least, regarding lefty Hollywood's self-righteous myopia, it's equally insufferable to see a bunch of liberals prattle on about how the Academy Awards were not sufficiently liberal to their liking.
