The 2016 Oscars was one to remember, partly because of Chris Rock’s impeccable comedic skills, and also because Leonardo finally nabbed that Oscar (unfortunately the notorious meme is dead now).

The real headliner, however was the award ceremony’s blatant lack of diversity in its nominees, an issue that several actors and Hollywood starlets of color had been discussing long before the actual show, with Chris Rock being one of them. Like many celebrities, he took to social media to voice his opinion about the Oscars, particularly Twitter. He tweeted things like “The #Oscars. The white BET awards”, poking fun at the all white Oscars. Rock even went as far as to comment about the boycotting of the awards show in a live joke directed at actress Jada Pinkett-Smith, “Jada’s going to boycott the Oscars? Jada boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna’s panties. I wasn’t invited!”, which garnered several laughs from the audience.

The lack of colored nominees in this year’s Oscars came as a shock to many people in the Black community, considering the success of films like Straight Outta Compton, which sported a predominantly Black cast. During the Oscars however, Chris Rock continuously mentioned the lack of colored representation and even showed a video clip of him interviewing several Blacks outside of a Compton theater on their opinion of the 2016 nominees, to the amusement of the audience, many, if not all, of the interviewees did not recognize or know any of the movie titles/ actors, showing the obvious catering to the white community.

Although the actor handled the Oscars with comedic grace, there were some moments of questionable judgement. For example some of Rock’s jokes about past generations getting lynched and facing other social atrocities were hard to swallow, and not to mention the cringeworthy appearance by Stacy Dash (an actress who not long ago publicly questioned the necessity for having a black history month) which was met with dead silence from the crowd. But, overall, Chris Rock did what he does best.  He made us laugh.