Let’s not dance around the point here. We’re going to remember this year’s Oscars for one thing and one thing only: the moment Will Smith rose up, out of his seat, and slapped Chris Rock across the face with an open hand. The words were “keep my wife’s name out your f***ing mouth”. The trigger was a joke made about Jada Pinkett Smith’s shaved head, made apparently without any awareness that she has talked openly about her hair loss from alopecia for some time. I’ve seen the memes. The salacious headlines. The Twitter-thread lectures. People will talk about this for days. They won’t talk about Ariana DeBose’s beautiful speech, after winning Best Supporting Actress, where she talked about her pride in being an openly queer woman of colour. They won’t talk about Troy Kotsur, the first deaf male actor to win an Academy Award, leaving half the room in tears merely through the force of his gratitude. They won’t talk about Jane Campion becoming the third woman in history to win an Oscar for Best Director.
People will just want to speculate. Was Will Smith’s slap connected to Rock’s previous hosting history, where he made a joke about Pinkett Smith’s decision to boycott the Academy Awards (to quote: “Jada boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna’s panties. I wasn’t invited! Oh, that’s not an invitation I would turn down!”)? Did Smith’s apology to the Academy, after his win for Best Actor, fix anything? Which actions are defensible and which are not? I don’t feel comfortable with any of it.
