People venting their anger at the Oscars has been happening as long as the Oscars themselves, because awards are always terrible. But this year, the internet discovered a potent new source of Oscar complaints: not just the awards themselves, but comments made by actors during or even after the show. A deep, new vein of outrage has been tapped.
Here are ten commenters expressing their anger about various jokes or comments made by actors, ranked from least to most outraged:
10. Katie McDonough, Salon
Source of outrage: After calling for equal pay onstage, Patricia Arquette added, backstage, “And it’s time for all the women in America and all the men that love women, and all the gay people, and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.”
Quote: “It’s clear that Arquette wanted to use her speech to talk about economic justice, and that’s a good thing. (And she will forever have my heart after her performance in ‘True Romance.’) The problem with her speech was simply that it was narrow. Her framing didn’t touch on the realities of the wage gap, and her later remarks flattened the fact that people embody multiple identities at once. This kind of thing isn’t a hazard of when celebrities get political, it’s a hazard of when any person doesn’t think expansively and intersectionally about their politics.”
9. Glenn Greenwald, interview
Source of outrage: Neil Patrick Harris joked that Edward Snowden “couldn’t be here for some treason.”
Quote: “I’m just gonna go ahead and treat it as a joke. I thought it was pretty pitiful, given Hollywood’s fondness for congratulating itself for doing things like standing up for McCarthyism and blacklists. So to just casually spew that sort of accusation against someone who’s not even charged with it, let alone convicted of it, I think is, you know, stupid and irresponsible.”
8. Stacey Dash, Fox News
Source of outrage: Arquette’s comments onstage about the wage gap.
Quote: “I was appalled. I couldn’t believe it. First of all, Patricia Arquette needs to do her history. In 1963, Kennedy passed an equal pay law. It’s still in effect. I didn’t get the memo that I didn’t have any rights.”
7. Arielle Castillo, Fusion
Source of outrage: Arquette’s backstage comments
Quote: “Arquette’s awkward framing sets up a distinction between ‘people of color’ and ‘us’ — which makes it seem like she’s talking about straight, white women needing the support of other oppressed groups. Many LGBT people and people of color are, in fact, women too. Arquette’s language excludes them from the larger conversation, asking groups to fight forher subgroup, rather than with everyone as a whole.”
6. Kelsey McKinney, Vox
Source of outrage: Arquette’s backstage comments
Quote: “Arquette doesn’t need to be ridiculed for her ignorant remarks. She needs to expose herself to more voices — the voices of women who aren’t white, straight, or upper class. She needs to listen to voices like John Legend’s.”
5. Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, The New Republic
Source of outrage: Arquette’s backstage comments
Quote: “The feminist project in general tends to be suspicious of attributing women’s political significance solely to their role as mothers, as in old-fashioned reactionary visions of Republican Motherhood. Further, addressing people as taxpayers is a rather unsavory (and typically right wing) habit that advances the notion people are worth what they pay in taxes.”
4. Erin Keane, Salon
Source of outrage: Sean Penn, giving his friend Alejandro González Iñárritu an award, joked, “Who gave this son of a bitch his green card?”
Quote: “Private jokes, especially when they toe or cross the line of good taste, have no place on the entertainment industry’s public stages. The fans watching at home don’t care how ‘brutal’ Iñárritu and Penn are to each other in the privacy of their own parties — they hear those jokes through their own lenses of experience, and for many, Penn’s joke was minimizing, humiliating, a way to laughingly put a Mexican-born artist in his place by reminding him he would always be an ‘other,’ not one of us. If the Oscars are to inspire fans to continue to go to the movies, Penn’s joke reminded them of how out of touch Hollywood is with their concerns.”
3. Amanda Marcotte, Slate
Source of outrage: Arquette backstage comments
Quote: “Arquette’s political grandstanding played into every ugly stereotype about ‘feminism’ being about little more than some privileged white women trying to become more privileged. Her comments were bad for the cause of equal pay and for feminism. Solidarity is not just for white women.”
2. Ana Maria Benedetti and Carolina Moreno, Huffington Post
Source of outrage: Penn
Quote: “The 2015 Oscars were filled with uplifting stories, calls to action for ALS and Alzheimer’s and a powerful reminder of the civil rights movement. But Sean Penn’s comment, right before announcing the Best Picture award at Sunday night’s ceremony, may have undone it all.”
1. Dave Zirin, The Nation
Source of outrage: Arquette backstage
Quote: “What is so aggravating is that Ms. Arquette’s comments could best be described as ‘anti-intersectional.’ When you speak of equal pay for women and call upon ‘all the gay people and all the people of color that we’ve fought for, to fight for us now’ it states pretty clearly that you see your struggle as one of straight, white, native-born women for equal pay, as if there aren’t masses of people who live beneath the weight of multiple labels that would benefit from such reforms.”
Additional quote: “It also blatantly ignores — instead of owning — the ways in which white-led middle-class feminist movements have in many instances historically ignored or even opposed the movements of workers, people of color and other oppressed groups. There are so many scholars and activists trying to actually own this history and change the ways in which people interact and organize in the future. It was difficult not to feel the pain of every person carefully trying to build those fragile alliances, only to have Ms. Arquette remind many precisely why those alliances need to be constructed in the first place.”
This ceremony has grown so upsetting that it may need to be canceled, or at least have a trigger warning.
