HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA - MARCH 27: Will Smith appears to slap Chris Rock onstage during the 94th ... [+] Annual Academy Awards at Dolby Theatre on March 27, 2022 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)
The Oscars are, by definition, a long night out, and it’s often the case after a festive marathon that hangovers will occur. Then there are those evenings of such a scale that they produce monumental aftershocks and reassessments. Will Smith’s sudden actions on stage shortly before he won the award for Best Actor will ensure that the 2022 Oscars will enter the history books in the latter category.
According to the dueling rules of the 17th and 18th centuries — when dueling had its arcane vogue in Europe and in Europe’s North American colonies — an open-handed slap across the face was thought of as the beginning, not the end, of a challenge between gentlemen. During those centuries, and well into the 19th century in secret as the practice was outlawed the French colonial cities of New Orleans and Mobile, the challenge proceeded toward the wounding and/or death of the disputants, at which point the elusive commodity of “satisfaction” was claimed to have been obtained. Obtained by whom and at what cost was, itself, a matter of dispute. It depended on who was left lying on the ground, and in what sort of state.
The point is that “satisfaction” in the very short term was, apparently, the commodity that Mr. Smith attempted to gain by slapping Chris Rock full on, with force, in the middle of Mr. Rock’s hostly duties, which, by every metric of every awards show in history, includes some gentle and some not-so-gentle roasting of prominent audience members. In other words, what Rock was doing, playing for laughs, belongs to the DNA of the event. The reality of the Oscars is, no matter the host, if you’re well-known — and the Smiths are very well-known — you can expect that the presenter and his or her writers will find you. (Ahoy out there, Ricky Gervais! Bit of advice: If Mr. Smith is in your audience, you might want to drop any material you might have developed about Mrs. Smith from the interstitial monologues.)
True, also, is the fact that Rock’s too-swift joke about Jada Pinkett Smith was a bad one. It was bad in several ways, most prominently in that the point of its spear, so to speak, was directed at a lady’s appearance, and (wittingly or not) it grazed an aspect of her appearance, alopecia, about which that lady has publicly shared her difficulties. That’s a no-no — not just today, in woke culture, but forever, backward or forward, in woke or un-woke times, any way you cut it. Second, it wasn’t a successful joke because its a priori requirements — the knowledge of Demi Moore’s costume and make-up for the quite forgettable GI Jane film — is a mighty skinny premise that doesn’t really pay with humor, illumination, or any other positive commodity once the connection is made. Rock himself seems to have acknowledged this with his “I-love-you-but...” delivery of the bomb. Predictably, the thing bombed.
But the fact of Smith’s sudden, shocking ambush of Mr. Rock having occurred during the Oscars’ broadcast — in front of a global audience of millions — means that satisfaction of any sort (other than the award for Smith’s fine portrayal of the occasionally harsh, autocratic stage father Richard Williams) is going to be difficult for Mr. Smith to obtain from this event. Smith lost control of himself, completely. It’s hard to imagine what he thought that he was going to gain with a physical assault, or where he thought that would lead, live on-air, with a supporting cast of dozens waiting in the wings, Academy members peppered through the audience, and an American television viewership of some 15 million.
Smith seemed to recognize that very large irony as it settled on his shoulders during the lurching, tattered remains of his acceptance speech for the Best Actor award, attempting to excuse himself on loyalty-to-family grounds, and, along the way, explaining his knowledge of the industrial code of learning to accept all barbs and to move on. To his credit, he actually apologized to his fellow actors and, in a smart bit of self-awareness and possibly self-preservation, to the Academy.
Mr. Smith is anything but dumb, which is, in a further irony, why he’s such a good actor. His obvious intelligence, on camera and off, is legion, which is why it’s an especially human predicament that he’s in. It’s also among the many reasons that the audience — and many in the wings — initially thought that the assault was scripted.
Notably, the one person not name-checked in Smith’s initial attempt at apology during his acceptance speech was Mr. Rock. That was unusual, and given the list of people to whom Smith felt moved to apologize, it came off as pointed.
Chris Rock is hardly Agamemnon, but in his momentary rage Will Smith did a fair impersonation of the disastrously impulsive Achilles. After that moment, the formidable wise man Denzel Washington stepped in to play the father figure who, judging from the mile-wide grin across his face as he walked Mr. Smith offstage, could not contain his amusement at the dust-up’s staggering improbability. What are the chances that an A-list Best Actor nominee would assault and berate a host during the Oscars? Nobody had imagined it. Offhand, Washington issued the event’s enduringly wise, statesmanly epitaph: In your highest moment, the Devil comes for you.
Arguably, in the moments after the broadcast was derailed, it was Rock who recovered in the most agile manner, welcoming the audience with superb timing after the break to the most sensational night “in television history.” This was a very smart ad lib. It should be studied by comedians, thespians and their directors and producers.
By it Rock meant to accomplish three things, all of which his statement did. First, one very good way to gain perspective on a sudden event of magnitude is to acknowledge it. It’s a fact that unscripted drama rules on television and especially so at the Oscars. Rock gave us all a larger perspective by showing us that he had retained his balance as a man and a presenter. Second: In that one line Rock acknowledged that the event would be instantly magnified and become what it now is, namely, a thing to be dissected by the responsible Academy bigs and by the chattering classes right around the orb, from Mumbai to London to New York and back out to Hollywood. In other words, he acknowledged the moment’s global ascent, and amusingly so.
Finally and most importantly, this posture, meaning Mr. Rock’s high level of objectivity immediately after the attack, reassured the audience that Mr. Smith’s attack did not unseat Rock or fully derail the broadcast, rather, Rock remained on duty, as host, to steady the ship of the broadcast with his mark in trade, namely, humor. Bluntly, that was hard-core show-biz professional — incorporating literally every value that Smith had so wantonly tried to destroy. The broadcast did lumber up out of the muck and slog on.
All this leaves Mr. Smith looking unfortunately childish and facing a more or less infinite morning after. It won’t necessarily be pleasant, but all monumental hangovers do have to be lived through. Smith won’t lack for outlets in which to explain himself, although the editors will be looking for something different this time around. Lifestyle editors across the country will be angling with Smith’s “people” to bag the first mea culpa confessional, and there will be several men’s mags tilling other facets of the unprecedented on-air implosion, from “anger management” pop-psychology pieces for Men’s Health to a friendly long-form “rehab” piece keyed to whatever Smith’s next movie is over at GQ. In terms of truly major media moves, surely waiting for Mr. Smith with an excellent camera team at one idyllic Santa Barbara flagstone verandah or another will be the inevitable mother of all American rehabilitative confessionals, Oprah.
Those steppingstones aside, right now, for Mr. Smith himself, one good way to begin to work out of the hole he’s dug for himself will be to apologize to Chris Rock man-to-man.
There are three basic tenets of and for such an apology. First, it’s owed. Smith interrupted a global broadcast with an act of wholly selfish, inexplicable physical violence. Second: In an infamously litigious community, Rock has not filed a police complaint, but the attack was ad hominem and was severely out-of-scale to its “crime,” Rock’s ill-formed joke. Smith bounded up onto the stage spoiling for a fight and did his best to start one. On air to accept his award, he has briefly attempted to excuse himself to a few people and an institution or two. But he hasn’t yet enlightened us on what he expected or why he thought he might be justified in bringing such a joust at that moment in that venue. Eighteenth-century “satisfaction” of what passes for “honor” at having attacked the author of an offense — in an unfair ambush of that joke’s author, it must be pointed out — is no justification.
Third: An apology to Rock doesn’t mean that Smith has to “bow” to Rock or even, ever, be friends. It simply means that Smith acknowledges his own mistake of exceeding the bounds of acceptable behavior directly to the man who took the brunt.
As of late on March 28, Smith is not yet reported to have spoken with Rock, a reparation that would seem to have been the first order of business in the cold light of a post-Oscars work week. To the extent that a missive issued on Instagram can be considered an apology, on March 28 Smith did list Rock in what can be described as an omnibus Instagram post that apologized to the Academy, the producers of the show, the Williams family, the film’s cast and crew, all Oscars attendees and viewers “around the world.”
As for the Academy, they considered ejecting Smith from the Oscars in the broadcast but, according to reports, the members who held power to do that were seated in different parts of the auditorium and could not be brought together before the Best Actor award was given to Smith. The Academy lost no time in ferociously condemning the actor on March 28, however.
Their official statement read quite ominously for Mr. Smith, to wit: "We have officially 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.”
Bottom line: This show has legs. It seems Mr. Smith is not finished with his apologies quite yet. However sympathetic and/or seemingly sincere, Instagram posts are about typing. Smith’s next round of apologies will have to be built on deeds in the real world.