#MeToo at the 2018 Oscars: the good, the bad, and the in between

“These are the 90th Academy Awards,” Jimmy Kimmel said in his monologue opening the Oscars on Sunday night. “This is history happening right here.”

But for many in attendance, and many watching, the most history-making aspect of the show wasn’t its 90th birthday — it was the fact that this was the first Academy Awards since the New York Times exposé on producer Harvey Weinstein, the first since Time’s Up, the first since #MeToo became a household name across America.

The Golden Globes had set the bar relatively high for awards shows when it came to addressing the issue of sexual misconduct in Hollywood, and one of the biggest questions going into the Oscars telecast on Sunday was how the biggest awards show of the season would handle the biggest story in Hollywood.

The answer, ultimately, was mixed — while some elements seemed to point to a more enlightened future for Hollywood, others seemed to reflect an industry mired in the past. The show itself is unlikely to be remembered as a groundbreaking moment, but it did include clear and specific calls for change — most of them by women — that could lead, in the long run, to a more equitable entertainment industry for everyone. Below, Vox rounds up the good, the bad, and the in between.

Speculation abounded prior to the ceremony about how much host Jimmy Kimmel would address the issue of sexual misconduct in Hollywood. The telecast’s producers said on Friday that the Kimmel’s monologue would be “current, but not as pointed” as recent Jimmy Kimmel Live segments on health care and gun control.

But on Sunday night, Kimmel tackled the issue of Hollywood harassment head on and managed to wring some humor from it. A joke about the Oscar statuette being the perfect man for the moment (“no penis at all”) felt a little stale. Still, when Kimmel quipped that Hollywood is so clueless about women that “we made a movie called What Women Want and it starred Mel Gibson,” the joke hit home, especially since Mel Gibson — whose ex-wife reported that he abused her, and who went on an anti-Semitic rant in 2006 in which he said that “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world” — co-starred in the family-friendly Daddy’s Home 2 in the midst of #MeToo.

Kimmel also offered an amusing but worthwhile reminder that reform in Hollywood can only go so far: “We need to set an example,” he said, “and the truth is if we are successful here, if we can work together to stop sexual harassment in the workplace, if we can do that, women will only have to deal with harassment all the time at every other place they go.”

As Vox’s Caroline Framke noted, Kimmel’s monologue wasn’t necessarily laugh-out-loud hilarious, but it was certainly relevant to the current moment. Kimmel may not have left the audience in stitches, but he didn’t let Hollywood off the hook, either.

Former Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant took home the Oscar for Best Animated Short for his film Dear Basketball. His acceptance speech got some notice for a dig at Fox News, but watching him accept an award rang oddly, at a time when Hollywood is supposed to be taking sexual misconduct seriously.

As Maura Judkis notes at the Washington Post, Bryant was arrested and charged with sexual assault in 2003, after a 19-year-old hotel employee reported that he raped her. The case was ultimately dropped when the woman declined to testify, and Bryant apologized, saying in a statement, “After months of reviewing discovery, listening to her attorney, and even her testimony in person, I now understand how she feels that she did not consent to this encounter.” The case got relatively little attention in the runup to the Oscars and didn’t prevent the Academy from awarding a statuette to Bryant.

Gary Oldman, meanwhile, won the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour. As Vox’s Constance Grady writes, Oldman’s ex-wife said in 2001 that the actor choked her and beat her with a telephone, and reiterated her report earlier this year. And in a 2014 interview, Oldman defended Mel Gibson for his 2006 anti-Semitic rant. “We’ve all said those things,” Oldman said.

The question of when and whether alleged perpetrators of sexual misconduct deserve career rehabilitation is a valid one. But no one is owed an Oscar, and honoring Bryant and Oldman felt like the act of an Academy all too willing to sweep past accusations under the rug.

Judd and Sorvino, both of whom have reported sexual misconduct by producer Harvey Weinstein, walked the red carpet together on Sunday and gave a joint interview to Vanity Fair editor Krista Smith. The moment gave them a chance to discuss some of the specific ways Hollywood women are working to make their industry and others safer, from backing anti-harassment bills in California to establishing the Time’s Up legal defense fund.

Judd also took the opportunity to remind viewers of the difficulties of speaking out about sexual harassment and assault, and the necessity of supporting those who do so. “Those of us who have come forward,” she said, “we’ve often been disbelieved, minimized, shamed, and so much of the movement is about externalizing that shame and putting it back where it belongs, which is with the perpetrator.”

In general, ABC’s preshow coverage was awkward, as hosts attempted to mention politics without getting too political. At one point, commentators tried to shoehorn a mention of Time’s Up into a seemingly unrelated discussion of Jane Fonda’s gown. Dealing with the reckoning sweeping Hollywood in a format generally reserved for lighter commentary was always going to be difficult, but ABC had months to prepare for this moment, and hosts still seemed a bit taken by surprise.

Red-carpet coverage on E! suffered from a different problem — the presence of Ryan Seacrest, who has been accused of sexual harassment and assault by a former stylist. E! has said an investigation found insufficient evidence to support her claims against Seacrest, and despite buzz that stars would avoid talking to Seacrest, he managed to land plenty of interviews on Sunday evening.

“One reason Seacrest, a fixture in live TV and an established producer worth over $380 million, might have earned his spot on the carpet is because he is a part of the machine that runs Hollywood,” Leigh Blickley writes at HuffPost. “He’s a boss himself, a power player in the ranks, a bigger success than most at the Oscars and a friend of many a celebrity. Seacrest gets a pass because he’s used to handing out the tickets.”

Watching great actresses get mad onscreen isn’t a substitute for systemic change in Hollywood or elsewhere. But in this moment, it still feels pretty good.

Kicking off the Best Supporting Actress category with a montage of women expressing anger felt like a way to acknowledge that women in Hollywood are fed up with the status quo — and that it’s high time their male colleagues started supporting them.

Choosing to address Time’s Up, #MeToo, and sexual misconduct directly was the right call for the Academy — it wouldn’t have been fair to leave the burden of addressing one of Hollywood’s most pressing problems to Kimmel and the presenters. The way the Oscars faced the issue — with a montage introduced by Ashley Judd, Salma Hayek, and Annabella Sciorra, all of whom have reported sexual misconduct by Weinstein — showed promise too.

Unfortunately, the montage itself didn’t fully deal with the issue at hand. As a testament to the importance of onscreen representation for women, people of color, and LGBTQ people, it wasn’t bad. As Vox’s Constance Grady wrote, “it’s exciting that people who are not straight white men get to see themselves represented onscreen more now than they have before, and it’s an accomplishment worth celebrating.”

But celebrating that accomplishment, and calling for more roles both behind and in front of the camera for people too long relegated to the sidelines, isn’t the same as tackling the very specific problem of sexual misconduct in the entertainment industry. While it gave well-deserved praise to some great and groundbreaking recent movies, the montage missed the opportunity to make any real comment on how Hollywood can be safer for the people who work there.

Frances McDormand won Best Actress for her performance in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a film whose politics have inspired a lot of criticism. Despite those criticisms, her acceptance speech near the end of the night was a rousing call to arms for the entertainment industry as a whole. Her voice breaking, she invited all the evening’s female nominees — “the actors ... the filmmakers, the producers, the directors, the writers, the cinematographer, the composers, the songwriters, the designers” — to stand up.

Then she issued a challenge: “Look around, ladies and gentlemen, because we all have stories to tell and projects we need financed. Don’t talk to us about it at the parties tonight; invite us into your office in a couple days — or you can come to ours, whichever suits you best — and we’ll tell you all about them.”

Finally, she said, “I have two words to leave with you tonight ... inclusion rider.” As Vox’s Caroline Framke explains, a rider in this context is part of a contract; by insisting on an inclusion rider, a powerful Hollywood player could “ensure that the project they’re signing on to will include a more gender- and race-inclusive talent pool.”

It was a deft move by McDormand. She’d primed the audience to expect either “Time’s Up” or “me too,” and what she gave them instead was something concrete — a practical suggestion that could lead to real money for people of color, women of all races, and other underrepresented groups in Hollywood.

Whether real change is coming to the entertainment industry remains to be seen. But despite some disappointing moments, the Oscars offered significant hope that Hollywood, thanks in large part to the efforts of women, can start to reform. Next year’s show — and the next, and the next, and the next — will reveal whether that hope was justified.