Will Smith Oscars slap exposes Hollywood’s double standards

If it was audience, attention, and a presence in the popular conversation that the Oscars wanted, they got it, big time, thanks to Will Smith’s attack – is assault too big a word? – on Chris Rock on Monday. But in the process, they also got an image problem they could well do without.

Suddenly, here’s this festival of liberal values – peace, love, harmony, diversity – looking like it’s been produced by boxing promoter Don King. What’s more, no one seems to have blinked an eye. Other than poor old Chris Rock, that is, who’s probably holding a bag of frozen peas over his.

To boil the moment down to its essence, we saw a man make a joke about another man’s wife. We saw the husband assault the joker for that ostensible offence. And we saw the assaulting husband embraced by all and sundry as if he were the injured party. It was, frankly, quite incredible.

Let the record show that Bradley Cooper threw his arms around Smith in the minutes after the latter had taken to the stage and slapped Rock, hard, across the face. That Tyler Perry, the winner of last year’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, put a consoling hand on Smith’s shoulder while Sean “Diddy” Combs offered his thoughts on the matter. And when Smith was later announced as winner of the best actor Oscar, there were John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson wrapping their arms around Smith in a sweet and welcoming embrace.

Exactly what kind of strange beat-him-to-a-pulp fiction were we witnessing here?

It all started when Rock made a joke at the expense of Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, who suffers from alopecia. “Jada, I love ya. GI Jane 2, can’t wait to see it,” Rock said, referring to a 1997 movie in which Demi Moore has a shaved head, as part of a routine in which he poked fun at various members of the audience. Will laughed, Jada looked pissed off, and a few seconds later Will strode to the stage and slapped Rock across the face, hard. Returning to his seat, he told the comedian to “keep my wife’s name out your f---ing mouth”.

Amid the confusion – at first glance, it looked like it may have been a set-up – audiences were left wondering what they had just witnessed. But as the broadcast rolled towards its end, and the incident overshadowed everything that followed, it became increasingly clear it was a genuine blow-up.

Smith’s acceptance speech minutes later, for his first Oscar, continued the theme of the chivalrous man protecting his little lady (or ladies). Likening himself to the man he plays in King Richard, the father of tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams, he started by observing that “Richard Williams was a fierce defender of his family.”

He invoked God, suggesting he had called on him with a sense of mission. While making the movie, he said, “I got to protect Aunjanue Ellis, who is one of the strongest, most delicate people I’ve ever met. I got to protect Saniyya [Sidney] and Demi [Singleton], the two actresses that played Venus and Serena.”

It was paternalistic, brutish, a clear-cut case of a saviour complex. The phrase “toxic masculinity” came to mind – just not in the auditorium, it seems.

Credit: Matt Golding

For context, we should perhaps acknowledge that Smith talked in his recently published autobiography about the searing impact of seeing his mother get punched in the head by his father when he was a child. “My father tormented me,” he said of their complex relationship. “And he was also one of the greatest men I’ve ever known. He was one of the greatest blessings of my life, and also one of my greatest sources of pain.”

Perhaps some of those who rushed to console, comfort or advise Smith were aware of this, and saw in his over-the-top response to some good old-fashioned roasting – the sort of thing for which Ricky Gervais has been lionised in recent years – signs of a man struggling with a complex psychological inheritance.

Rock, meanwhile, simply vanished. He wasn’t seen again in the telecast. No one put their arms around him. When Smith apologised it was to the Academy, not to the man he’d attacked. Perhaps reading the room, Rock reportedly later advised that he would not be pressing charges.

The incident was thuggish, the response to it graceless. It felt uncomfortably like siding with the perpetrator rather than the victim of an act that should never have happened, and absolutely should not have been endorsed.

After the dismal ratings slide of last year, the Oscars got the attention it desperately craved. But decency demands it should have responded to Smith’s actions with something more than a standing ovation and a hug.

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