No stars for puerile Will Smith or his gutless apology for Chris Rock slap

Will Smith’s decision to quit the Academy after slapping fellow actor Chris Rock onstage during the Oscars means he cannot vote or nominate for the awards. Picture: AFP

So now Will Smith has resigned from the Academy and he has also apologised to comedian Chris Rock, whom he gratuitously slapped at last week’s Oscars ceremony. The resignation was clearly strategic because he was liable to have been drummed out of the Academy anyway and the apology to Rock came much too late and was gutless because it was done on Instagram. A bigger man would have called a press conference and begged forgiveness for the narcissistic grossness of his behaviour.

The upshot of the resignation is that Smith, who won the Best Actor Oscar for the feel-good King Richard, playing the doting dad of tennis’s Williams sisters, cannot vote or nominate for the Oscars though he can be nominated and receive them. Though why on Earth anyone would give another Oscar – they’re rarely won more than once anyway – to a man who has proved himself unfit to be an audience member makes the question academic in any case.

There is a school of thought that suggests Rock should be slapped as often as possible if you don’t have a taste for his snide sideways humour. But this is simply a matter of preference and would suggest any comic host is just fair game for the nearest lout who wants to shout and scream and hit someone.

Rock has behaved with great dignity and restraint. He has refused to lay charges and there has been no move to sue as comedian Jim Carrey has urged. Bear in mind that the Los Angeles police were willing and ready to arrest Smith on a charge of battery and to haul him to a police station before he had time to pick up his Oscar, which came 20 minutes or so after the assault, which had been preceded by Smith shouting out to Rock to take his wife’s name out of his “f..king” mouth.

Jada Pinkett Smith suffers from alopecia (hair loss) and Rock made an allusion to a 1995 Demi Moore film, GI Jane, in which the heroine sported a shaved head. Smith’s incontinent rage has drawn attention to the nature of their marriage, which has sustained break-ups and surprise revelations to one or other partner of infidelities and a general picture of an open marriage in which either partner’s sexual fancies might be given open slather. This is nobody’s business but the Smiths but it is a consequence of the self-infatuated slap that Smith has highlighted the fact his own ideal of monogamy and his wife’s might be a bit less rigorous than that of many people. Various commentators also quoted Smith’s memoirs talking about his father punching his mother in the face but nonetheless being a fine man.

Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith at the Oscars last week. Picture: AFP

Well, much is forgiven of those who love much. But has Smith demonstrated love as opposed to the crazy twisted reaches of pathological self-regard? What does his wife think, what do his children think of their daddy behaving like a spoiled brat before the world?

It’s a disgusting footnote to this episode that various people – Bradley Cooper, Benedict Cumberbatch, for heaven’s sake – seem to have leapt to their feet in spontaneous approval of the Smith Slap. The only charitable interpretation of this idiocy is to imagine they thought it was all part of the show but you wonder.

Isn’t it a bit sickening, though, to read the reports of Smith swanning around the Vanity Fair party in the immediate wake of slapping a fellow performer, a fellow black American, a man doing nothing but his job? His attendance at the Vanity Fair party was an act of self-mesmerised insolence. It’s also a bit sickening to think Smith’s slap of Rock was the dramatic high point of one of the dullest sets of Oscars ever.

No doubt Denzel Washington was right in his Christian way to say to Smith that it’s when you’re at your height that the devil comes for you. But Smith was still sounding as proud as Lucifer when he reported this. They say Smith is worth billions as a star. It would be nice if he showed what he was worth as a human being.