“I call it the ‘holy slap’ now,” purred Jada Pinkett Smith of her husband’s decision to lamp Chris Rock on stage at the Oscars two years ago, “because so many positive things came after it.” God love ’em and everything, but aren’t celebrities incredible? There really is nothing – no incident too blatantly ghastly and embarrassing – that cannot be folded into some kind of aspirational narrative of personal growth. Just as Gwyneth Paltrow’s “conscious uncoupling” offered an opportunity for Her Vajesty to get gorgeously divorced in a way normies could never, so Jada would have you believe that public assault lies on the other side of the glass against which the likes of us can only press our envious snotty noses.
But look, the Oscar nominations are out today! The whole pageant is about to crank up once more, though the obvious sadness is that Will Smith was formally banned from the ceremony for 10 years, meaning attenders at the 10 March event will have to sit through approximately 27 hours of it, miserably safe in the knowledge that no outbreak of “holy” low-level violence could occur.
