Like many others, Saturday Night Live’s Melissa Villaseñor wasn’t all that impressed with this year’s Oscar nominees. So in this week’s episode, she decided to sing about it. In a gold sequin dress that made her look like a little gold (wo)man, Villaseñor roasted the Academy Awards, putting most of her focus on how the Academy is rewarding white male rage.
In honor of the biggest night in film, Villaseñor wrote original songs for a few of this year’s Best Picture nominees, including Joker. Over a bossa nova beat, she sang about Joaquin Phoenix being “Skinny, skinny / Laughs a lot, but still so scary.” She sang about his now-famous dance on those steps and him taking out his aggression on his mom. “But the thing that this movie is really about / Is white male rage / White male rage,” she sang.
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The thing is, that’s pretty much the theme of this Oscars where not one woman was nominated for Best Director and only one performer of color was nominated in the acting categories. That honor went to Cynthia Erivo, who earned her first nomination for Harriet. It might be why Villaseñor’s song for The Irishman sounded so familiar, right down to the same Brazilian beat. This time she was able to whittle the film starring de-aged Al Pacino and Robert De Niro down to just one very telling verse: “They’re old and they’re young / And it’s white male rage.”
Are you detecting a pattern here? Good because her big finale, which shouts out Once Upon A Time... in Hollywood, Jojo Rabbit, and 1917, is a bop about, you guessed it, white male rage. It’s a song Greta Gerwig probably knows by heart by now.
The 92nd Academy Awards airs February 9 and we’re extremely prepared to say congratulations to those men.