There’s a history of bad blood between Chris Rock and Will/Jada. When Will Smith was snubbed by the Academy in the 2016 for his performance in “Concussion” she boycotted the ceremony and Chris Rock joked that her boycott was pointless because she wasn’t invited in the first place. The tasteless joke from last night was the icing on the cake that sealed the deal.
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Your post was the literal definition of a straw man argument; creating an alternate hypothetical situation and arguing based on that instead of the real situation being discussed.
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Will Smith was on stage 40mins later not 5mins. They did not only have 30seconds to decide. There was at least one ad break before he received his award. He should have been removed.
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I’m giving 2.5% odds it was a work (staged).
It’s true they are, or have played, crisis actors.
But that doesnt mean the fight was a false flag.
Boom. This, right here, should be the start, center, and finish of the entire discussion. Rock should be disinvited from any future Oscar hosting because of this. End of story.
The rest of it is a distraction.
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What if they asked the assaulted person, Chris Rock, what he wanted done, and he said “Meh, let him be”?
You talk like a person who’s far more certain than you can possibly be about what went on behind the scenes.
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I’m not sure if “looking classy” is quite the phrase I’d use. If I read the situation correctly, the issue was Rock making fun of Jada’s shaved head, which I understand is a response to having alopecia. And I’m not a Will Smith fanboy, but given the amount of scrutiny his marriage has had in public recently, I can get why making fun of your wife’s medical condition would make you snap. Doesn’t excuse the violence, but Rock’s definitely not classy for making the joke. Perhaps a bit of redemption for not pressing charges (maybe realizing that when you go for a sleazy jab, sometimes people jab back).
A better way to have handled it would have been to ignore it at the time, and when he accepted his award, to have made a comment that it takes a really small man to make fun of someone’s medical condition. Will would have looked classy, and Rock would look like a sleaze.
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Given the disproportionate ‘outrage’ displayed for such a trivial altercation*, I’d say most of it is a distraction… along with a helluva LOT of personal projection.
Was there misogyny and toxic masculinity at work?
Most definitely, though there is also the self righteous ego stroking in response, that so many people seem unable keep themselves from expressing…
*Trivial in that for once, no one involved was seriously injured, maimed, killed or imprisoned; that’s damn rare in a story regarding Black people these days.
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A comedian once did a very unfunny bit about Asians in the US eating dogs. We chose to walk out on the act and the comedian decided to double down on us as we left.
Some people should be slapped.
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I wonder if Will Smith had waited till afterwards to tag Chris Rock if people would think less of him?
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This is utterly outrageous and horrifying. I paid no attention to the Oscars, beyond planning to scan a list of winners today. Now I’m thinking about them, curious about what went on, deciding how I feel about it, and commenting on it. Damn you, Oscars!!!
Not that I hold this particular institution in high esteem, but at minimum how do you ensure this doesn’t happen in the future? Regardless of how you feel about this incident, there’s probably an interest in preventing people in the audience from walking on stage to interrupt performances for any reason. There’s likely already some conduct rules in place pertaining to this, but as others have said, applying those here is tricky for a few reasons.
It can’t be that complicated to enforce some basic standard of conduct at these events; pretty much any comedy club would have responded to a similar incident by making the person who did the slapping leave even if it was in response to an absolutely inappropriate joke.
Surely the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences could figure out how to hold itself to the same standards as The Laugh Factory.
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Unfortunately, The Academy is more of a Chuckle Hut level operation
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The general public and media reactions about this situation have been maddening. Rock’s joke was not particularly funny. He compared Jada to a person who was considered to look pretty darn good with short hair. It would be like if I shaved my head and people said I looked like Michael Jordan, The Rock, or Stone Cold Steve Austin.
If he had called her Curly… Okay I get it.
This is probably not going to lead to the end of Will Smith’s career. This will not give stand up audience members licence to assault stand ups. This isn’t justified by a black man making fun of a black woman’s hair in front of white people. This isn’t justified by Rock making the movie Bad Hair. What if he killed Rock? He didn’t. What if it was a woman? It wasn’t.This wasn’t “a work,” because it made Smith look like a immature child.
Smith deserves credit for the amount of money he has made for Hollywood, but as an actor and a public figure, he has had a difficult time in situations where he is asked to take himself even a slight bit less seriously. He wouldn’t do an on-camera kiss in Six Degrees. When he played Hancock, he was a proud stoic brand of drunken loser instead of a more irredeemable scoundrel. He is rarely the butt of jokes on screen. I figure if he had to play the Carlton character on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, he would have given up acting.
If this leads to the end of his career, it will only be because people notice what a joyless person Smith seems to be.
Why start applying them now, when, as many have pointed out, sexual predators like Polanski and Weinstein still have their Oscars…oh, wait, I see the difference…
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Aside from the fact that those men’s greater transgressions didn’t happen on stage during the awards ceremony, I see one huge difference:
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Does the Academy not have a mechanism for symbolic fines for conduct unbecoming? Like they do in sports?
Ah, who am I kidding. This kind of thing should never even happen in the first place.
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