Will Smith Slapped The Oscars Back Into The Spotlight

We’ve come a long way since Ellen DeGeneres could snap a celebrity-packed selfie at the Oscars and break the internet; nowadays, we need Will Smith to slap Chris Rock in the face, onstage, for the public to give a damn about the Academy Awards (as the 2017 Moonlight fiasco showed us, the ceremony isn’t worth watching without something going horribly wrong).

The now-iconic slap, taking place in a theatre full of performers, had an aura of unreality to it, sparked by a lazy, forgettable one-liner. Chris Rock’s joke about Jada Smith’s shaved head was admittedly mean, considering she suffers from alopecia (whoever was writing Rock’s jokes clearly didn’t take the time to Google why she shaves her head). But nobody could have expected Will Smith to react the way he did (you can watch the uncensored footage here).

Indeed, Smith’s slow walk to the stage seemed like the setup to a bit – clearly, Rock expected Smith to maybe take the mic and quip back, in good humor. Even the slap itself, which barely seemed to connect to Rock’s face, didn’t quite seem real – it wasn’t until Smith returned to his seat and started screaming obscenities at Rock that the audience understood that the incident wasn’t a performance.

The night grew even more surreal a few minutes later, as Smith was awarded Best Actor (which should have been a highlight of his long career), and gave a meandering, teary speech in which he framed himself as a protector and compared himself to Richard Williams, apologizing to the Academy and his “fellow-nominees,” but notably, not to Rock. The speech was met with rapturous applause from the audience.

Everything about the incident was bizarre, the kind of thing that should only occur in fiction – some even compared it to a scene from Bojack Horseman, or Euphoria. Even stranger is the fact that Smith can be seen laughing at the joke before walking onstage and slapping Rock.

Are Hollywood actors unaware of how regular adults respond to stress? Do they believe in their own fiction, see the world through dumb blockbuster logic? Rather than simply talking to Rock, Smith stood up for Jada’s honor in the way that a character in a Will Smith movie would.

Ironically, Smith’s slap had everyone talking about the Oscars, but nobody mentioned the awards, or who had won them. The conversation was about celebrity entitlement, toxic masculinity, and the weird, alternate reality of Hollywood.

Soon, the internet exploded with takes of varying levels of lunacy, opinions extending through every inch of the political spectrum, and beyond, with commentators invoking race and gender, some even comparing the slap to 9/11, or the war in Ukraine, projecting their own warped worldview onto the incident, as though it were anything other than a literal slapfight.

Comedians seemed the most spooked, with some worrying that Smith had set a precedent, as though anyone other than a mega-celebrity could storm a stage and assault the host without being arrested.

Judd Apatow had the funniest reaction by far, tweeting that Smith “could have killed him,” a take that was so hilariously off the mark that Apatow soon deleted it, after one too many commentators poked fun at him.

In response to the condemnation, amid ridiculous claims that the slap had forever sullied the Oscars, commentators pointed out that Hollywood has always been home to egotists and abusers, and Smith was certainly not the worst person to be awarded an Oscar, or the first whose fame shielded them from consequence.

While Oscar night is traditionally the time for actors to flaunt their performative progressivism, Hollywood has no coherent moral compass; indeed, the same crowd who applauded Smith’s speech once booed Michael Moore off the stage for daring to point out the dreadful reality of the Iraq War.

I’m not sure how next year could possibly top “the slap,” but Smith has managed to make the Oscars culturally relevant again, with a single swipe of his hand.