What The Academy’s April 18 Meeting To ‘Discipline’ Will Smith Can Do

That didn’t take long: The March 31 statement announcing the consideration of disciplinary actions to be lodged against Will Smith by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Will Smith is heavy in opprobrium. Citing its “Standards of Conduct,” the Academy goes to lengths to add heft to the mushrooming cloud of fallout that Mr. Smith faces for his extreme lapse of reason on air, before an audience of some 15 million, during the Academy awards broadcast on March 27.

Here’s the meat of the statement:

Board of Governors today initiated disciplinary proceedings against Mr. Smith for violations of the Academy’s Standards of Conduct, including inappropriate physical contact, abusive or threatening behavior, and compromising the integrity of the Academy.

Consistent with the Academy’s Standards of Conduct, as well as California law, Mr. Smith is being provided at least 15 days’ notice of a vote regarding his violations and sanctions, and the opportunity to be heard beforehand by means of a written response.

The statement also confirms the reported narrative of the incident’s immediate aftermath that Smith was asked to leave the auditorium but refused. TMZ initially reported that the Academy’s president, David Rubin, and CEO, Dawn Hudson, had asked Smith to leave. The Academy’s March 31 statement is in effect its indictment of Smith. Due process has been engaged. The Board of Governors will begin to hold court, so to speak, on April 18. Between now and then, we can count on Mr. Smith and his lawyers to be crafting a response to the charges, but to begin with, since the deed itself, Mr. Smith’s Oscars broadcast attack, is itself unprecedented, the April 18 meeting may suffice, or may not suffice, to get the process moving down the road toward a judgement. The Academy strongly implies that it will adjudicate on that date.

Of the sanctions that could be meted out, the stripping of membership in the Academy is the most severe. In history, five people are known to have been expelled from the Academy, although, unofficially, there are rumored to be more. Chief among the five known are Roman Polanski, Bill Cosby, and Harvey Weinstein, all of whom were voted out as their highly publicized criminal cases took on gravitas. Smith’s case is much lighter than those, not least because, to date, it does not include criminal behavior, mainly because Chris Rock has not filed a police complaint for assault. Nevertheless, the Academy has stated that it is taking “California law” into consideration in mediating the Smith case.

Smith’s case in re the Academy also stands alone in that it involves a severe disruption of the cherished, public Academy awards ceremony itself. Put differently, Polanski’s, Cosby’s and Weinstein’s criminal actions were adjudicated in the proper judicial fora of their day and that external jurisprudence triggered their expulsion from the Academy. Smith’s actions on the evening under review, including his refusal to leave the auditorium when asked and his subsequent, strangely celebratory attendance at the Vanity Fair party, hit the Academy’s governors where they live. The application of the Academy’s standards of conduct is being focused on the Academy’s annual big evening out — its own process and image, if you will — that was, also, made a victim with Smith’s blow to Mr. Rock’s face.

No less a member of the Academy’s Board of Governors than the formidable Whoopi Goldberg used her pulpit on “The View” to state that “There are consequences. There are big consequences because nobody is OK with what happened. Nobody, nobody, nobody.”

This is Whoopi, one of America’s most stalwart comedians and actresses, Whoopi, the mother figure nonpareil, and Whoopi, a forgiving, if outspoken, realist both on screen and off.

Certainly, in Hollywood and elsewhere, whether the Academy will on April 18 strip Smith of his Best Actor award will be (read: is already) hotly handicapped and speculated. The question there is a delicate one: Do the Academy’s standards of conduct, under which these sanctions of Smith are being adjudicated and meted out, also carry sufficient mandate to revoke a vote by the Academy for one of its awards? This is uncharted territory for pretty much everybody, including, presumably, the Board of Governors. On a separate front for Mr. Smith, whether he’ll face any civil legal action from any corner is up for grabs, although it’s a fair bet now that Los Angeles’ very sharpest civil liability attorneys will be expecting requests to explore the matter.

Unknown, also, is the effect that this will have on the April deliberations: The Academy is fighting the arguably unintentional but nevertheless unmistakable impression left by the on-air sequence of events on March 27 that it somehow instantly forgave Smith for his attack on Rock by “allowing” him to stay in the auditorium to receive the Best Actor award. In other words: The Academy didn’t forcefully eject Smith after his refusal to leave. Unusually, the Academy went out of its way in its March 31 statement to apologize to Chris Rock, thanking him for dealing professionally with the attack.

Bottom line, the reckoning is shaping up to have a larger professional impact on Mr. Smith than he arguably imagined when he strode up to Mr. Rock on the Oscars stage.