Oscar producer Gil Cates issued a statement on Monday saying he and the academy stand behind Rock, and denying that anyone at the academy had taken offense.
"The Academy is excited about Chris Rock hosting this year's Oscar telecast and looking forward to a very funny evening with him," Cates said. "Chris's comments over the past few weeks are meant to be humorous digs at the show that some people, obviously including Chris himself, think may be a bit too stuffy."
Likewise, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation issued a statement in defense of Rock. "Chris Rock isn't making fun of gays -- he's poking fun at the Oscars," GLAAD executive director Joan Garry said. "It's shtick ..."
The big question is: will Drudge and conservatives succeed in using their politics to dictate who is an acceptable host for a MSM television awards show viewed by up to one billion people? ABC is counting on Rock to re-energize the show and its ratings. They are going for The Daily Show audience. That's where the advertising dollars are, not with grannies in Podunk.
One other note: How much of the radical right's anti-Oscar fury is really the result of their feeling betrayed by Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby? They really don't like this movie, and it really might win best picture. They've called it everything from a neo-nazi movie to communist propoganda.
No matter. Rush Limbaugh used his radio megaphone to inveigh against the "liberal propaganda" of "Million Dollar Baby," in which Eastwood plays a crusty old fight trainer who takes on a fledgling "girl" boxer (Hilary Swank) desperate to be a champ. Limbaugh charged that the film was a subversively encoded endorsement of euthanasia, and the usual gang of ayotallahs chimed in. Michael Medved, the conservative radio host, has said that "hate is not too strong a word" to characterize his opinion of "Million Dollar Baby." Rabbi Daniel Lapin, a longtime ally of the Christian right, went on MSNBC to accuse Eastwood of a cultural crime comparable to Bill Clinton having "brought the term 'oral sex' to America's dinner tables."
To which, Eastwood responds:
What do you have to give these people to make them happy?" Eastwood asked when I phoned to get his reaction to his new status as a radical leftist. He is baffled that those "who expound from the right on American values" could reject a movie about a heroine who is "willing to pull herself up by the bootstraps, to work hard and persevere no matter what" to realize her dream. "That all sounds like Americana to me, like something out of Wendell Willkie," he says. "And the villains in the movie include people who are participating in welfare fraud."
Prediction: The radical right loses this round. Chris Rock will host the Oscars. Million Dollar Baby will continue to rake it in at the box office, if not win best picture. The buzz will continue right up until show time, making for more viewers. We'll be watching and might even blog live. It's a civil liberties issue now.
