Neil Patrick Harris delivered a fun, musical opening to Sunday’s Academy Awards.
He won over the audience right away by acknowledging this year’s biggest controversy — the fact that civil rights film “Selma” only got two nominations and for the first time in nearly two decades, no person of color received an acting nomination.
“Welcome to the 87th Oscars,” Harris started. “Tonight, we honor Hollywood’s best and whitest, sorry brightest.”
He then segued into a spectacular musical number, which transported the show’s first-time host into a myriad of iconic movies in film history, including “Wizard of Oz,” “Field of Dreams,” “Ghost,” “Avengers,” and “Star Wars,” among many others.
Joined by Anna Kendrick in celebrating the medium, Jack Black joins them onstage to bemoan the darker, more financially-driven side of the business, which of course was something we saw come out of the emails of the Sony hacking. Kendrick ends up chasing him away.