The controversy surrounding the Oscars has died down, now that the awards themselves are over, but some people are still talking about the ceremony itself. While host Chris Rock certainly took the Oscars' overwhelming whiteness to task, he saved some of his jokes for those that brought attention to the issue in the first place. Rock made a point to call out Jada Pinkett Smith for her call to boycott the Oscars. The actress however, doesn’t seem to mind the jokes so much. She knows how it works.
Jada Pinkett Smith, actress, and wife of actor Will Smith, was the first one to go online and begin a call for a boycott of the Oscars following the announcement of the 2016 nominees due to the fact that every actor and actress nominated was white. Chris Rock took her to task, primarily because she, who has been working primarily in TV of late, wouldn’t have been attending the ceremony in the first place were it not for her relationship. ET Online has footage of Pinkett Smith being asked what she thought of the jokes. It didn’t seem to bother her.
Hey look it comes with the territory, we gotta keep it moving. We got a lot of stuff we gotta handle, a lot of stuff going on in our world right now. We gotta keep it moving.
It sounds like Jada Pinkett Smith is trying to keep her eye on the bigger picture and not get bogged down in jokes during the Oscars. Either that, or she’s completely moved on to other things and isn’t even thinking about the Oscars anymore. It’s not entirely clear what "stuff" she needs to handle. Either way, it seems that even if the joke bothered her to begin with, and it’s not clear that it did, she’s certainly not thinking about it anymore.
In the months between the announcement of the Oscar nominations and the ceremony there was a great deal of talk about a lack of diversity within the Academy. The organization has taken steps to attempt make their membership more diverse going forward. Something that will hopefully help deal with these issues. Here’s a clip that includes Chris Rock’s jokes at the expense of Jada Pinkett Smith.
For the most part, this should be the last we hear of this year’s controversy. Now we’ll just need to wait a year and see if we’re going to through it all over again.
