NEW YORK — When Chris Rock first hosted the Oscars in 2005, the four black actors nominated that year — Morgan Freeman, Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo and Jamie Foxx (twice!) — didn’t escape his notice.
“It’s like the Def Oscar Jam!” Rock exclaimed.
The story will be slightly different this time around.
When Rock strides onto the Dolby Theatre stage on Feb. 28, he‘ll see no nominated African-American actors before him. He’ll instead be greeted by a Hollywood beset by a crisis over diversity that has led to calls for a boycott of the broadcast, spurred the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to rewrite its membership bylaws and even sparked pleas for Rock, himself, to pull out.
In the ongoing fallout, Rock has loomed on the horizon like Judgment Day. But it’s unclear just what awaits the academy and Hollywood come show time. A reckoning? A catharsis? Awkward fits of laughter?
Probably all of the above.
His silence hasn’t stopped others from chiming in. R&B singer Tyrese Gibson and rapper 50 Cent have said Rock should step down. Golden Globes host Ricky Gervais encouraged Rock to start the show “in a KKK hood, then whip it off & say, ‘Sorry, it’s the only way I could get in.’”
Whoopi Goldberg has defended him: “Boycotting doesn’t work and it’s also a slap in the face of Chris Rock,” she said. And Arsenio Hall, who helped give Rock his start, said: “It’s so important that he’s on the mic that night.”
As one of the top stand-ups in the country, the 50-year-old Rock has long weaved uncommonly frank and provocative discussions about race into his act, movies and TV shows. His first comedy album, “Born Suspect,” was about being presumed guilty of any crime because of his skin color. One of his most divisive routines was when he drew a contrast between “black people” and “n------” in his special “Bring the Pain.”
In 2014, as he was releasing his last movie, “Top Five,” which he wrote and directed, Rock turned to Hollywood in a widely hailed essay in which he was both critical and sanguine about what he called “a white industry.”
“Just as the NBA is a black industry,” he wrote. “I’m not even saying it’s a bad thing. It just is.”
He continued: “They don’t really hire black men. A black man with bass in his voice and maybe a little hint of facial hair? Not going to happen. It is what it is. I’m a guy who’s accepted it all. But forget whether Hollywood is black enough. A better question is: Is Hollywood Mexican enough?”
In choosing Rock to host this year’s Oscars, the academy sought a kind of antidote to last year’s safer show, hosted by Neil Patrick Harris. His presence creates a difficult choice for would-be boycotters: Tune out and you'll miss a potentially riveting showdown. The prospect of such fireworks is expected to lift ratings for the telecast, which dipped for last year’s show — also the target of a boycott — to a six-year low.
But for now, the only thing Rock has said publicly are the words of James Baldwin, in a Martin Luther King Day reading of the author’s 1963 letter to his nephew, “My Dungeon Shook.”
One excerpt: “The black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations. You, don’t be afraid.”