As most people probably know by now, Sunday night’s Academy Awards ceremony featured many montages, one of which was described as a “montage of Oscar hosts” when it was introduced by George Clooney. The retrospective montage of past hosts included a moment of almost every host in the show’s history. But there was one host who was not included in that montage, the 4-time host and Academy Awards winner Whoopi Goldberg.
On Monday’s airing of the ABC television program The View, the subject was discussed ad nauseam by the “chatting-heads”, and Whoopi’s feelings of disappointment about the omission were abundantly and painfully clear. The other co-hosts spoke of Whoopi’s many historical milestones related to the ceremony: she was the first female Oscar host, the first Oscar winner to host, and only the second African-American woman to ever win an Oscar. Up until now, most writers about that particular program have described it simply in terms of how displeased the co-hosts were with the slight.
However, there is a different, possibly more plausible perspective on what actually took place Monday on The View. Consider that not only does Whoopi have to suffer the daily indignity of being reduced to just another “chatting-head” on The View, but also that her co-hosts insisted upon going on and on, in front of millions of American people, rubbing in the fact that the Oscar winning actress and Oscar hosting actress had not been shown in one of the montages on Sunday night. Dumb and dumberer Elisabeth Hasselbeck babbled on and on about how it must feel so terrible to be so slighted. Placing a cherry atop the poison pudding, the ever-duplicitous Barbara Walters unwittingly asserted that nothing Whoopi had ever done at the Oscars was really a Great Moment.
Whoopi just sat there, looking unbelievably miserable, trying to collect the remaining shards of her dignity that were being scattered around the set. When the others just wouldn’t stop, Whoopi quietly got up and gave each of them “the kiss of death” just to shut their mouths, briefly weeping when she got behind Barbara Walters.
Update: On Tuesday, the producer of the Oscar awards show apologized to Whoopi for leaving her out. The View should be interesting to watch tomorrow.
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George Clooney: The Oscar Montage of Hosts
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The View: Sadly Embarrassing Moments
Technorati: Whoopi Goldberg, Whoopi, African-American, The Academy Awards, The Oscars, The Oscar Montage of Hosts, Hollywood, California, Los Angeles, George Clooney, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Barbara Walters, The View, television, ABC, ABC television, celebrities, pesonalities, photographs, entertainment, movies, video, videos, culture, cultural, gay, GLBT, social, social life, society, news, world news, entertainment news, world
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May 29, 2008 at 2:05 am
Barbara Walter’s life was influenced greatly by her older sister and she’s written a beautiful memoir about her life. I read another memoir of a life influence by a sibling that I recommend highly – I actually liked it even more. The memoir is “”My Stroke of Insight”" by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. Dr Taylor became a Harvard brain scientist to find the cause and cure for schizophrenia because her older brother was a sufferer. Then, crazy as life can be, Dr. Taylor had a stroke at age 37. What was amazing was that her left brain was shut down by the stroke – where language and thinking occur – but her right brain was fully functioning. She experienced bliss and nirvana and the way she writes about it (or talks about it in her now famous TED talk) is incredible.
What I took away from Dr. Taylor’s book above all, and why I recommend it so highly, is that you don’t have to have a stroke or take drugs to find the deep inner peace that she talks about. Her book explains how. “”I want what she’s having”", and thanks to this wonderful book, I can!