Academy Award Winning Movies by year

Losing their shine … the statuettes line up at this year’s Oscars ceremony. Photograph: ddp USA/Rex/Shutterstock

The night of 28 February 2016 contained one of the great passages in Oscar history, and one of the finest addresses to the nation from this terrible electoral season. Chris Rock was aces. No one reckoned in advance that he had anything but a very testing job as host. He had to be tough, brave, witty, engaging – and decent. He triumphed on every count, thanks to sheer ability. He knew he was a part of show business, and not a black panther. Striding across stage in his bright white jacket, his voice soaring and cracking – like Charlie Parker’s – he was nervous but prickly eloquent, caustic yet encouraging. The vexed background to this show and its lack of black nominees could not have had a better release.

Related: Oscars 2016: campaigners claim boycott victory as ratings hit eight-year low

That much tact and consolation would not be entirely out of place if this wasn’t a show. Boosting the numbers is all very well if you’re looking for a UN seal of approval, but it’s not show business – one of the citadels of organised unfairness, in which personality and popularity invariably crush political correctness.

America is a country in which racism is smothered, ingenious and rife – and I would guess that that dark mood was pierced by Chris Rock’s pungent talk. But the thought of future Oscar evenings turned into similar correctness parades will thin the audience quicker than the steady attrition of recent years. And this year, the audience on TV dropped by 8% – it was down to about 34 million.

Cheryl Boone Isaacs arrives at the governors ball following this year’s Academy Awards. Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

The Academy is worried, but acting scared for over three hours is not heart-warming. At one point, the president of the Academy, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, stepped forward and said that the state of membership at the Academy was bad and it was going to be changed. That was shaming hypocrisy. It may not be Isaacs’ fault (she has been on the board close to 25 years), but Academy membership has been a joke for decades: too many whites; too few women; too few people of colour; too few young members; too few who have to see the films before voting – like none. Why? Because they don’t have to, because this is a club for the elite in show business, as hostile to the young and to outsiders as any club membership.

Isaacs could have agreed that the Academy was so archaic – as a portrait of America at large – that maybe it should be closed down. Or should have been reconstructed decades ago. A university with an admissions policy like that of the Academy could face closure.

Chris Rock’s Oscar monologue