Vote in our poll: Will Smith slaps Chris Rock at Oscars. Forgivable or indefensible?
You probably heard. Will Smith slapped Chris Rock on the Academy Awards stage in front of a live, international audience Sunday night.
This happened soon after: Smith won the best actor Oscar for portraying Serena and Venus Williams’ father in “King Richard.”
The smackdown came after Rock, on stage to present the Oscar for best documentary, cracked a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.
After the show, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences condemned the act with a brief statement: “The Academy does not condone violence of any form.”
Then Monday afternoon the academy announced it had started “a formal review around the incident and will explore further action and consequences in accordance with our Bylaws, Standards of Conduct and California law.”
According to those standards, members are required to act “in a manner consistent with the good reputation” of the group, and unacceptable conduct includes “physical contact that is uninvited and, in the situation, inappropriate and unwelcome.”
Later on Monday, Smith apologized to Rock for the first time in an Instagram post.
“Violence in all of its forms is poisonous and destructive. My behavior at last night’s Academy Awards was unacceptable and inexcusable,” he wrote. “Jokes at my expense are a part of the job, but a joke about Jada’s medical condition was too much for me to bear and I reacted emotionally.
“I would like to publicly apologize to you, Chris. I was out of line and I was wrong. I am embarrassed and my actions were not indicative of the man I want to be. There is no place for violence in a world of love and kindness.”
Tabloids dubbed the moment the “ugliest moment in Oscars history.”
Amplified by Rock’s microphone, the slap sounded more like a heavy punch inside the cavernous Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.
The look on Rock’s face as he recoiled? Shock.
The look of celebrities in the audience? Shock.
The reaction of people watching on TV? What the bleep just happened?
The court of public opinion exploded. Sides were chosen, teams picked. There were memes, too.
Team Chris or Team Will?
Forgivable or indefensible?
What do you think? Vote in the poll at the bottom of this story.
The slap incited thousands of passionate social media comments about bullying, misogyny, toxic masculinity, ableism and violence, debates that spilled into Monday. Movie fans, disability advocates, celebrities, parents, Black Twitter. Even the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., Bernice King, weighed in with a string of tweets Monday about violence.
By then, the Los Angeles Police Department said in a statement that Rock declined to press charges.
Before the slap
Rock was on stage to present the Oscar for documentary feature. Looking at Pinkett Smith in the audience, Rock said he was excited to see her in “G.I. Jane 2,” a reference to her shaved head. In the 1997 movie, “G.I. Jane,” Demi Moore shaved her hair to portray a tough, female Navy Seal candidate.
Will laughed. Jada didn’t.
Last year she announced that she shaved off her hair because she struggles with alopecia, an autoimmune disorder that causes hair loss.
She rolled her eyes dramatically and folded her hands in her lap like a queen displeased with the court jester.
The cameras didn’t show the interaction — if there was any —between husband and wife before Smith left his front-row seat, walked onto the stage and slapped Rock.
“Oh wow,” Rock said, watching as Smith walked back to his seat. “Will Smith just smacked the s**t out of me.”
When he sat down, Smith screamed at Rock.
“Keep my wife’s name out your f***ing mouth!”
“Wow, dude, it was a G.I. Jane joke,” said Rock.
Smith yelled louder.
“Keep my wife’s name out your f***ing mouth!”
“I’m going to, OK?” a visibly shaken Rock said, composing himself and quipping, “that was the … greatest night in the history of television.”
Later, Jaden Smith, the couple’s son, tweeted: “And. That’s. How. We. Do. It.”
Who is the bully?
When he accepted his Oscar afterward with tears in his eyes, Smith apologized to the academy and viewers, but not to Rock.
“I know we’re all still processing, but the way casual violence was normalized tonight by a collective national audience will have consequences that we can’t even fathom in the moment,” tweeted Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of LDF, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc.
Some people called Rock a bully for cracking a joke at Pinkett Smith’s expense. More people, though, called Smith out for bullying, including actor/director Rob Reiner, who called on Smith to apologize to Rock.
“Will Smith owes Chris Rock a huge apology. There is no excuse for what he did. He’s lucky Chris is not filing assault charges. The excuses he made tonight were bull(s**t),” Reiner wrote, earning nearly 160,000 likes as of Monday morning.
This exchange of comments on Variety’s story about the night shows the public’s divided opinions.
“I don’t know what’s going on in the comments, clearly you people have no one in your lives going through a situation like that, If i was Will Smith, i’d have done the same. Chris Rock’s the Idiot here.”
“No one ever EVER has the right to hit another person.”
“Intuitively, we feel that comedy is one of the things that helps us cope with the difficulties of living. Will got it twisted up and lost his dignity tonight.”
It wasn’t the first time Rock had joked about the couple from the Oscars stage.
After Pinkett Smith boycotted the 2016 Oscars ceremony to protest its lack of diversity, Rock, the host that year, implied in his opening monologue that she wasn’t invited anyway.
“Violence isn’t ok. Assault is never the answer,” actress Sophia Bush tweeted. “Also? This is the 2nd time that Chris has made fun of Jada on the #Oscars stage, & tonight he went after her alopecia. Punching down at someone’s auto-immune disease is wrong. Doing so on purpose is cruel. They both need a breather.”
Comedian and actress Tiffany Haddish, a friend of the couple, applauded Smith for standing up for his wife, though many more women argued that Pinkett Smith can stand up for herself.
Haddish said Rock, too, is a friend of the Smiths and wondered why Rock would make such a joke.
“When I saw a Black man stand up for his wife. That meant so much to me,” Haddish told People magazine at the Governors Ball after-party.
“As a woman, who has been unprotected, for someone to say, ‘Keep my wife’s name out your mouth, leave my wife alone,’ that’s what your husband is supposed to do, right? Protect you.
“And that meant the world to me. And maybe the world might not like how it went down, but for me, it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen because it made me believe that there are still men out there that love and care about their women, their wives.”
Tell us what you think in the poll below. Can’t see it? Click here.
This story was originally published March 28, 2022 at 11:19 AM.
.jpg)