This year’s Academy Awards (AKA the Oscars) was full of beautiful, inspirational, shocking, and awkward moments. This awards show might have been the least expected event to have the audience giving stale looks or even feeling uncomfortable, but given all pre-Oscar talk about boycotts and lack of diversity during Black History Month, something was bound to happen. Instead of the traditional best to worst moments at an award show, I’m going to give you ten best to awkward moments.
10. Don’t Act Like You Didn’t Know It Wasn’t Coming: As soon as the show began host Chris Rock was sure to address the lack of diversity issues in the only way that seemed right—with jokes. The lack of diversity in Hollywood jokes loosened everyone up and addressed the issue instead of completely ignoring it like society likes to consistently do.
9. The Droid’s Moment to Shine: The Star Wars droids, C-3P0, R2-D2, and BB-8 rolled out onto the stage to chit chat and honor the composer, John Williams. I was not expecting them to be in attendance! This was definitely one of the best moments of the show, especially for Star Wars fanatics.
This year’s Oscars featured an appearance from everyone’s favorite droids.
8. FINALLY: I think we all can agree (if not all, then definitely the ladies who probably pay more attention to his face than his acting) we all shouted FINALLY when Leonardo DiCaprio won his first Oscar. Despite several nominations in the past two decades, at age 41, he won his first Academy Award for the movie The Revenant, which was nominated in 12 categories. Yes, I said 12.
Leo finally caught the Golden Snitch.
7. Until It Happens To You: One of the most beautiful moments of the night was Lady Gaga performing her song “’Til It Happens To You” (from the documentary The Hunting Ground) after being introduced by Joe Biden with his speech on the importance of knowing that the person abused should never be blamed or think, What did I do wrong? This performance was just as powerful as beautiful as Lady Gaga played a white piano and sang while surrounded by women and men sexual assault survivors.
6. Mad Max’s Weirdness Is Awarded: Mad Max: Fury Road‘s won the most creative awards of the night: Film Editing, Costume Design, Production Design, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, and Makeup and Hair. These out-of-the-box outfits and mesmerizing designs did not go unnoticed, and were recognized by winning in these technical and artistic categories.
It’s no surprise why Mad Max: Fury Road won for Costume Design and Makeup and Hair.
5. Stallone Didn’t Win? Was that a Steve Harvey Mistake? Sylvester Stallone’s performance in Creed was well-deserving of the Best Supporting Actor Award. There’s just one thing…he didn’t win it. Surely, this was Steve Harvey saying the wrong winner again. The looks from audience members and tweets galore definitely disagreed with Mark Rylance winning over Stallone. A big disappointment for the night.
4. Sarah’s Filibustering: I know politics are consuming the media now, but filibustering from Sarah Silverman reared its ugly head at the 2016 Academy Awards. Introducing Sam Smith’s performance of “Writing’s On the Wall”, she started of saying she hadn’t seen the movie and finished talking about having sex with 007. Umm ok? If Sam Smith’s voice had not been so beautiful her unnecessary rambling would’ve killed the whole mood for the song. Then again, who can really ruin Sam?
3. Funny or Nah……Nah: Chris Rock’s shot at Jada and Will was more confusing and awkward than funny. He even honored Jack Black in the “Black History Month Minute” segment, perhaps taking shots at Will Smith, but it just seemed stupid instead.
2. FOUR HOURS?: I can barely get through a 1 hour and 30 minutes movie; how do you expect me to sit through a 4 hour award show? The rambling was at an all-time high this year, which forced the award show to go almost four hours. I wondered why I was so disinterested during the show. Long pauses and people continuing to talk over the “wrap the speech up music” made the show one of the most awkward of all.
1. This Definitely Took the Cake: Stacey Dash is now known for her comments on Black History…well just black people in general really. Before the awards, she criticized the Black Lives Matter movement, and stated that BET network and Black History Month shouldn’t exist. Her reason: “it’s a double standard,” That is a direct quote by the way. After coming on the stage and wishing everyone a “Happy Black History Month!”—while holding a hand in the air. A sentence that got one clap (literally one). As much as she shouldn’t be number one for anything right now, she deserves the number one most awkward moment at the Oscars.
Stacey Dash taking in that single, awakward clap.