Arts & Entertainment
Kevin Hart steps aside as 2019 Oscar host after protests
In the age of #MeToo, a controversial host is toast
Kevin Hart. (Photo Facebook)
UPDATE: Comedian and actor Kevin Hart says he has stepped down from hosting the 2019 Oscars following a controversy over homophobic tweets and comments from his stand up act from as far back as 2009.
Hart said he does not wish to be a distraction and that he is “sorry he had hurt people” after calls for the Academy to drop him went viral.
Hart had said hosting the Oscars was “a goal on my list for a long time.”
On Thursday, Hart initially responded to outcry over his being named by the Academy as host of the ceremony with a video posted on Instagram, in which he said, “Guys, I’m nearly 40 years old. If you don’t believe that people change, grow, evolve as they get older, I don’t know what to tell you. If you want to hold people in a position where they always have to justify the past, do you. I’m the wrong guy, man.”
This was followed later on Thursday evening with another video, in which the comedian told followers the Academy had called him and offered him an ultimatum: apologize for the tweets or step down as host. He refused to apologize, saying he had “addressed this several times. This is not the first time this has come up. I’ve addressed it. I’ve spoken on it.”
Finally, late in the day, Hart announced via Twitter that he had chosen to step down “because I do not want to be a distraction on a night that should be celebrated by so many amazing talented artists.”
“I sincerely apologise to the LGBTQ community for my insensitive words of the past,” he said.
I’m sorry that I hurt people.. I am evolving and want to continue to do so. My goal is to bring people together not tear us apart. Much love & appreciation to the Academy. I hope we can meet again.
— Kevin Hart (@KevinHart4real) December 7, 2018
As its much-criticized (and now recanted) decision to add a “Best Popular Film” category to its awards roster earlier this year clearly revealed, the Oscars are desperate to increase their ever-declining ratings.
Has the Academy Award lost its way? That question is increasingly being asked.
For the broadcast of the Academy Awards’ 90th annual ceremony in 2018, viewership was about 26.5 million people – around 20% lower than the previous year, it was the first time the figure had dropped below 30 million and the lowest number since Nielsen started tracking Oscar ratings in 1974.
The Hart fiasco was born of a reckless effort to boost its relevance and regain audience.
At first glance, it seemed like the perfect solution to their problem. Hart is immensely popular, performing to sell-out crowds in huge venues like the 69,000-seat Lincoln Financial Field in his hometown of Philadelphia. He topped Forbes’ 2016 list of the highest-paid comedians, and he’s proven his appeal to movie crowds with box-office hits, like this year’s “Night School” and “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.”
His films have grossed $3.5 billion worldwide, and his social media presence (35 million followers on Twitter, 65 million on Instagram) is impressive. The chance to see what he does as an Oscar host obviously had the potential to draw a lot of viewers that wouldn’t normally tune in.
In addition, Hart had been vocal about his desire to host the Oscars for several years now.
It’s a job that has proven thankless for many celebrities who have done it in the past – from Chevy Chase to David Letterman to Seth McFarlane, the ceremony has been fronted by a long list of popular comedians who were deemed to have failed spectacularly, and there’s an even longer list of personalities who have been asked and turned it down (as detailed in a recent piece by the Hollywood Reporter).
But Hart had actively been after the gig since at least 2015, when the Los Angeles Times reported him as saying, “If I can start the campaign now and get them into it, I’m all for it. I would just jump at the opportunity.”
Lastly, as only the fourth African-American person ever to host the ceremony (following Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, and four-time host Whoopi Goldberg), Hart would potentially have helped to smooth over the lingering criticism stemming from the #OscarsSoWhite controversy of two years ago, when the lack of diversity among the Academy’s award nominations – and onstage at its ceremony – underscored the inadequate representation of non-whites within the content produced by the Hollywood film industry. In a year when most of the apparent front-runners seem, yet again, to be white, having a black host might be a way to stave off any resurgence of backlash.
Unfortunately, this solution failed to take into account the messaging it sent on another front.
The Academy – in typically tone-deaf fashion – may have chosen a host who checks off several important boxes for image-conscious Hollywood, but in doing so it ignored Hart’s problematic history of homophobia.
And as you can see from the Instagram post above, Hart is now positioning himself as a victim of PC culture run amok.
It’s not all that different from the notorious comedy routine for his 2010 TV special, “Seriously Funny,” Hart joked that as a parent, “one of my biggest fears is my son growing up and being gay.” After quickly adding that he had “nothing against gay people,” he went on to say that “as a heterosexual male, if I can prevent my son from being gay, I will.” He went on to joke that every kid has a “gay moment… but when it happens, you gotta nip it in the bud.”
In a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, Hart confessed that he “wouldn’t tell the joke today.” His reasons, however, had nothing to do with the obvious anti-gay bias involved; instead, he deflected by saying, “the times weren’t as sensitive as they are now. I think we love to make big deals out of things that aren’t necessarily big deals, because we can. These things become public spectacles. So why set yourself up for failure?”
He also responded in an interview with Parade, by saying, “I had one gay joke in my career and it was about my son at a birthday party, and it was before things got as PC as they are now.”
In other words, his only remorse was over how it affected his image.
Blaming the current #MeToo movement for creating this atmosphere is not a show of remorse. Neither is saying it’s something he’s sorry about while he keeps doing it.
Apparently, that remorse has not been strong enough to keep him from making more homophobic comments. His Twitter feed has been laced with them throughout his career – things like “Yo if my son comes home & try’s 2 play with my daughter’s doll house I’m going 2 break it over his head % say n my voice ‘stop that’s gay.’”
In one particularly offensive tweet, he called out another Twitter user by saying their profile picture looked “like a gay billboard for AIDS.”
He has repeatedly used phrases like “no homo” and “no homo gay,” and lambasted his critics by calling them such names as “f*g boy,” “gay face,” “fat faced f*g,” and “man bitch.”
According to an article published by Queerty just this morning, Hart had been deleting many of these posts – most of which had already been re-Tweeted in protest by thousands of Twitter users after news broke of his Oscar gig.
There’s also the matter of his treatment of ex-wife Torrei Hart, to whom he admitted being physically abusive in his 2017 memoir, “I Can’t Make This Up.” He also confessed in a radio interview last year to having cheated on his current wife, Eniko Parrish, just a few months earlier – while she was pregnant.
With LGBTQ-focused films like “Boy Erased” and “Bohemian Rhapsody” predicted to be in the running, as well as “A Star Is Born,” which features gay icon Lady Gaga, this year’s Oscars are shaping up to have a strong queer presence. With this in mind, placing Hart in the center of the proceedings – when his long track record of homophobic remarks was already well-documented and should have been taken into account by the Academy before offering him the job – was always a bad idea.
Whether or not the comedian really believes the homophobic viewpoints he has projected in his comedy – which, for the record, he has repeatedly insisted he does not – his selection as host sent a mixed message from the Academy to its membership and to its millions of avid followers, many of whom are either LGBTQ or allies.
It’s not the first time the organization has faced this issue. In 2011, Brett Ratner was forced to resign as producer of that year’s Oscar ceremony due to his record of homophobic slurs.
As for the Hart debacle, the Academy has yet to issue a statement.
Movies
A ‘Battle’ we can’t avoid
Critical darling is part action thriller, part political allegory, part satire
When Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” debuted on American movie screens last September, it had a lot of things going for it: an acclaimed Hollywood auteur working with a cast that included three Oscar-winning actors, on an ambitious blockbuster with his biggest budget to date, and a $70 million advertising campaign to draw in the crowds. It was even released in IMAX.
It was still a box office disappointment, failing to achieve its “break-even” threshold before making the jump from big screen to small via VOD rentals and streaming on HBO Max. Whatever the reason – an ambivalence toward its stars, a lack of clarity around what it was about, divisive pushback from both progressive and conservative camps over perceived messaging, or a general sense of fatigue over real-world events that had pushed potential moviegoers to their saturation point for politically charged material – audiences failed to show up for it.
The story did not end there, of course; most critics, unconcerned with box office receipts, embraced Anderson’s grand-scale opus, and it’s now a top contender in this year’s awards race, already securing top prizes at the Golden Globe and Critics’ Choice Awards, nominated for a record number of SAG’s Actor Awards, and almost certain to be a front runner in multiple categories at the Academy Awards on March 15.
For cinema buffs who care about such things, that means the time has come: get over all those misgivings and hesitations, whatever reasons might be behind them, and see for yourself why it’s at the top of so many “Best Of” lists.
Adapted by Anderson from the 1990 Thomas Pynchon novel “Vineland,” “One Battle” is part action thriller, part political allegory, part jet-black satire, and – as the first feature film shot primarily in the “VistaVision” format since the early 1960s – all gloriously cinematic. It unspools a near-mythic saga of oppression, resistance, and family bonds, set in an authoritarian America of unspecified date, in which a former revolutionary (Leonardo DiCaprio) is attempting to raise his teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti) under the radar after her mother (Teyana Taylor) betrayed the movement and fled the country. Now living under a fake identity and consumed by paranoia and a weed habit, he has grown soft and unprepared when a corrupt military officer (Sean Penn) – who may be his daughter’s real biological father – tracks them down and apprehends her. Determined to rescue her, he reconnects with his old revolutionary network and enlists the aid of her karate teacher (Benicio Del Toro), embarking on a desperate rescue mission while her captor plots to erase all traces of his former “indiscretion” with her mother.
It’s a plot straight out of a mainstream action melodrama, top-heavy with opportunities for old-school action, sensationalistic violence, and epic car chases (all of which it delivers), but in the hands of Anderson – whose sensibilities always strike a provocative balance between introspection, nostalgia, and a sense of apt-but-irreverent destiny – it becomes much more intriguing than the generic tropes with which he invokes to cover his own absurdist leanings.
Indeed, it’s that absurdity which infuses “One Battle” with a bemusedly observational tone and emerges to distinguish it from the “action movie” format it uses to relay its narrative. From DiCaprio (whose performance highlights his subtle comedic gifts as much as his “serious” acting chops) as a bathrobe-clad underdog hero with shades of The Dude from the Coen Brothers’ “The Big Liebowski,” to the uncomfortably hilarious creepy secret society of financially elite white supremacists that lurks in the margins of the action, Anderson gives us plenty of satirical fodder to chuckle about, even if we cringe as we do it; like that masterpiece of too-close-to-home political comedy, Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 nuclear holocaust farce “Dr. Strangelove,” it offers us ridiculousness and buffoonery which rings so perfectly true in a terrifying reality that we can’t really laugh at it.
That, perhaps, is why Anderson’s film has had a hard time drawing viewers; though it’s based on a book from nearly four decades ago and it was conceived, written, and created well before our current political reality, the world it creates hits a little too close to home. It imagines a roughly contemporary America ruled by a draconian regime, where immigration enforcement, police, and the military all seem wrapped into one oppressive force, and where unapologetic racism dictates an entire ideology that works in the shadows to impose its twisted values on the world. When it was conceived and written, it must have felt like an exaggeration; now, watching the final product in 2026, it feels almost like an inevitability. Let’s face it, none of us wants to accept the reality of fascism imposing itself on our daily lives; a movie that forces us to confront it is, unfortunately, bound to feel like a downer. We get enough “doomscrolling” on social media; we can’t be faulted for not wanting more of it when we sit down to watch a movie.
In truth, however, “One Battle” is anything but a downer. Full of comedic flourish, it maintains a rigorous distance that makes it impossible to make snap judgments about its characters, and that makes all the difference – especially with characters like DiCaprio’s protective dad, whose behavior sometimes feels toxic from a certain point of view. And though it’s a movie which has no qualms about showing us terrifying things we would rather not see, it somehow comes off better in the end than it might have done by making everything feel safe.
“Safe” is something we are never allowed to feel in Anderson’s outlandish action adventure, even at an intellectual level; even if we can laugh at some of its over-the-top flourishes or find emotional (or ideological) satisfaction in the way things ultimately play out, we can’t walk away from it without feeling the dread that comes from recognizing the ugly truths behind its satirical absurdities. In the end, it’s all too real, too familiar, too dire for us not to be unsettled. After all, it’s only a movie, but the things it shows us are not far removed from the world outside our doors. Indeed, they’re getting closer every day.
Visually masterful, superbly performed, and flawlessly delivered by a cinematic master, it’s a movie that, like it or not, confronts us with the discomforting reality we face, and there’s nobody to save it from us but ourselves.
Sports
‘Heated Rivalry’ stars to participate in Olympic torch relay
Games to take place next month in Italy
“Heated Rivalry” stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie will participate in the Olympic torch relay ahead of the 2026 Winter Olympics that will take place next month in Italy.
HBO Max, which distributes “Heated Rivalry” in the U.S., made the announcement on Thursday in a press release.
The games will take place in Milan and Cortina from Feb. 6-22. The HBO Max announcement did not specifically say when Williams and Storrie will participate in the torch relay.
Bars & Parties
Here’s where to watch ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ with fellow fans
Entertainers TrevHER and Grey host event with live performance
Spark Social Events will host “Ru Paul’s Drag Race S18 Watch Party Hosted by Local Drag Queens” on Friday, Jan. 23 at 8 p.m.
Drag entertainers TrevHER and Grey will provide commentary and make live predictions on who’s staying and who’s going home. Stick around after the show for a live drag performance. The watch party will take place on a heated outdoor patio and cozy indoor space.
This event is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
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A ‘Battle’ we can’t avoid
LGBTQ Ugandans targeted ahead of country’s elections
Trump-appointed EEOC leadership rescinds LGBTQ worker guidance
‘Heated Rivalry’ stars to participate in Olympic torch relay
McPike prevails in ‘firehouse’ Dem primary for Va. House of Delegates
LGBTQ Iranians join anti-government protests
Faith programming remains key part of Creating Change Conference
The power of no
