Since this year's Oscars were made of about 85% retrospective clips, it meant that viewers were forced to watch every last self-congratulatory moment from Oscar history on Sunday.
Except one – thanks to a heartbreaking oversight, Vassilis Fotopoulos' speech after winning the Best Art Direction Oscar for Zorba The Greek in 1964 was cruelly omitted from the proceedings.
Oh, and everything Whoopi Goldberg ever did. Despite winning an Oscar – and being the Oscars host on four separate occasions between 1994 and 2001 – there was no sign of Whoopi Goldberg anywhere in all the endless montages on Sunday. And that made Whoopi Goldberg cry. On TV. Video after the jump.
Jon Stewart had better watch out, otherwise he'll fall prey to the Curse Of The Oscar Host. It's a curse you may not have heard of, mainly because we've just invented it, but it's still true. It involves people who have hosted the Oscars becoming uncontrollable emotional wrecks about shit that nobody cares about on television. It started when 2007 Oscars host Ellen DeGeneres wailed about a puppy on her TV show, and now it's continuing with four-time Oscar host Whoopi Goldberg.
You see, thanks to the writers' strike, Sunday's Oscar show was brimming with the kind of dreary nostalgic clip montages that bore the life out of you if you're young and falsely reinforce the idea that things were better in the past if you're young. On and on they went – there's Cuba Gooding Jr, there's David Letterman, there's Celine Dion, there's fucking Snow White singing a bastardised duet of Proud Mary with titting Rob Lowe for christ's sake – and yet nobody thought to include any Whoopi Goldberg.
And on The View yesterday, Whoopi Goldberg had tears in her eyes thanks to the upset that goes along with being ignored by a tedious clip package in an over-long, obscenely smug awards ceremony. Look, here's the video…
Ridiculous, isn't it? After all, we didn't see any Xena Warrior Princess in any of the Oscar montages, and we doubt she's particularly cut up about it.
Then again, as the women on The View pointed out, Whoopi Goldberg was only the second black woman to win an Oscar and the first woman to host the Oscars at all, which does make her slightly significant. Maybe the clip researchers should have double-checked their list to make sure they weren't leaving anyone important out.
Or maybe – just maybe – the only person in the entire world who even slightly cares about any of this is Whoopi Goldberg, and everyone else is happy that she was left out of all the montages because it made the Oscars five or six seconds shorter than they otherwise would have been.
Still, though, Whoopi Goldberg's tearful reaction to the snub just shines a light on the difference between her and her predecessor on The View. Because if Rosie O'Donnell had hosted the Oscars and missed out on a montage clip, the Kodak Theatre would be a mess of rubble, steel and fragments of Jack Nicholson's skull by now.
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mst3kster says
With all the shit going on in this world, the snubbing of Whoopie on a show no one watched is a “Hot Topic” for the View?
And why did everyone (except Whoopie) keep bringing up that she was the first Black to do this, and the first Black to do that? Talk about setting racial equality back quite a bit. We are all equal aren’t we?