So shocking was Will Smith’s reaction to presenter Chris Rock’s joke about his wife’s hair loss, it is pretty much the only thing anyone can remember about the 94th Academy awards now. That and Smith’s equally surreal acceptance speech for best actor 40 minutes later, in which he cast himself as a protector and tearfully pleaded that “love will make you do crazy things”. Smith might as well have done a Men in Black memory-wipe on the rest of the ceremony.
It was the slap that launched a thousand tweets, memes and overreaching op-eds on the subject of Black masculinity. Celebrity gestures of support and condemnation immediately flooded in, for both team Rock and team Smith. Comedians exhausted every possible joke on the subject (“What does Chris Rock have on his face? Fresh prints”). Then the world moved on, but The Slap continued to echo around Hollywood.
