Rock kept hammering the theme with pre-recorded bits. The best of these was one that showed how hard it was to squeeze black performers into this year’s nominated films, a montage that spliced Whoopi Goldberg into "Joy" as a cleaning lady unimpressed with Jennifer Lawrence‘s mop handling, Leslie Jones into "The Revenant" in place of the attacking bear, Tracy Morgan as a Danish-eating transvestite in "The Danish Girl," and Rock himself as a stranded astronaut that white NASA officials wouldn’t even spend $2,500 to rescue in "The Martian." Another bit, a reprise of one he did when he hosted in 2005, had him interviewing black moviegoers in Compton, none of whom had seen or heard of any of this year’s nominated movies. (But they’d all seen "Straight Outta Compton.") The weakest was a "Black History Month Minute" with a bait-and-switch punchline that didn’t live up to its elaborate set-up and inadvertently proved Rock’s point about lack of opportunity by wasting Angela Bassett, who deserves better.
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