Opinions Editor

I spent this year’s Academy Awards the same way I spend most of my days: eating spaghetti in my pajamas and criticizing Sam Smith. As with every year, there were certain highlights that defined the night, however, this year most of those highlights were pretty nauseating.
The evening got off to a rough start with host Chris Rock’s opening monologue. Naturally, the focal point of his set was the Oscar’s diversity issue (or lack thereof). Rock attempted to compare the lack of black nominees with the “real issues” of the Civil Rights movement of the ’60s, which implied two things: first, that current-day African Americans are no longer facing violent, hateful and specific persecution; in that same vein, that racism has to look like a literal lynch mob in order to be “real.” Does he not know that more unarmed black people were killed by police in 2015 than in any year for the last century? Does he not know that, not only is the Ku Klux Klan still totally active but a current presidential nominee (Donald Trump) has their explicit support? I hoped that Chris Rock would get on stage and, somehow, convey to the 80 million people watching how wrong this was. Instead, he took their fragile, pasty egos and shielded them from the whole icky “race” thing.
The eye rolling didn’t stop there.
During his acceptance speech for winning Best Original Song, “Writing on the Wall” crooner Sam Smith made a remark about how “no openly gay man had ever won an Oscar,” according to an interview he had read with Sir Ian McKellan. Unfortunately for Smith,  he was not the first openly gay man to win an Oscar. As a matter of fact, he makes the eighth openly gay individual to win an Oscar, including Elton John, Melissa Etheridge and Howard Ashman.
Award season veterans like myself are not unfamiliar with celebrity snafus. I want my first tattoo to be whatever gibberish John Travolta said instead of “Idina Menzel” when he introduced her at the Awards in 2014. But Smith’s flub could have been avoided altogether with a quick google search, and Rock was all but apologizing for the whole race kerfuffle.
Of course, the night wasn’t all bad. Leo DiCaprio earned his win, at last, and used his platform to spread a message about climate change. Frankly, though, the best thing about him getting that gold is that this meme can finally die.