The most generous possible reading of Chris Rock’s Jada Pinkett Smith joke, for example, is that he finds the idea of a woman with short hair just hilarious. This does not seem unlikely. After all, his previous silence was about the domestic nightmare that would await the poor Javier Bardem if he won the best actor, but his miss, Penelope Cruz, fails to win the best actress. You know what women are like! Four years after #MeToo, Oscar feminism has become weak and fast-paced. This was difficult to predict: the dial seemed to be turning in only one direction. In 2018, Kevin Hart was fired from the Oscars a few days after he was announced as a presenter, following the discovery of homophobic tweets. This year they return to the podium for the first time in four years: they were all women, none of them were known for captivity. However, under the direction of incoming TV producer Will Packer – a longtime Hart collaborator – as it happens – no one on stage on Sunday seemed as willing to undo any progress as Amy Schumer, Regina Hall and Wanda Sykes. You know what women are like! Chris Rock presents at the Oscars. Photo: Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty Images In one sketch, Sykes was dragged as the father of Aphrodite and Serena Williams, Richard, apparently with the sole purpose of complaining about how much hair she had to shave off her legs. Schumer’s routine was based on pointing out to the public that she had to lose all of her baby weight, three years after her son was born. He then hung from the ceiling in a Spider-Man costume that turned it into a floating fist – a human pinata that we would hit with our best lines. This was the kind of sting that Rebel Wilson used to make before her recent radical health effort. As witnessed in Baftas a fortnight ago, Wilson exchanges it with a kind of angry horn, with most of the jokes following the pattern of her desperation to do the particular sexual favor to that particular actor. The lucky one to receive the sexually desperate baton on Sunday was Hall, a decent and interesting actress, who somehow stated that she was single in her first appearance and, in the second, invited selected actors for a “naked” Covid test, giving finally Jason Momoa a real hit. The longer the night lasted, the weaker Dawson’s influence faded. Next year, they just need to refresh the statuette in the image of Benny Hill.
