Watch, Watching, Watched -- Until the Sun Comes Up

[Jaxom 1974]

This Oscar's has been equally fascinating, cringe, inspirational, tiresome, and fun...

[Corvinus85]

So did Zelenskyy do a video for the Oscars? I hope not, because this stupidity with Will Smith will have certainly upstaged it.

[dbunting]

They're saying he hit him for real. Jada has a hair loss issue, allepecia (?SP) and Will thought Chris was making fun of her for it with the GI Jane comment.

If he hit him for real then he should be ashamed to have played Ali because that was sad...

[JGP]

It was an open handed slap, and Rock absolutely deserved it.

I had to log off Twitter after I read Judd Apatow losing his fucking mind.

Shit was getting stupid.

[dbunting]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

Will Smith winning the career Oscar. This was not deserving at all. 

I thought he did a great job in the movie.

[IFR]

25 minutes ago, JEORDHl said:

It was an open handed slap, and Rock absolutely deserved it.

Are you serious? She has alopecia, not cancer. Someone inform Larry David that he's now allowed to slap people around for making fun of his baldness.

But really, if you watch the clip Will Smith is initially laughing at the joke until he notices his wife is not amused. And then he assaults someone on live television because he's an entitled celebrity who engages criminal behavior just because his wife doesn't like a joke, and believes he can get away with it because he's not held accountable to the same laws as the peons he entertains.

[JGP]

Alopecia isn't a small thing for Black women, whose hair, in most settings until relatively recently, were policed pretty strictly. Then of course, there's the fact that Rock produced a documentary about the politicization of Black hair only a few years ago but decides to dump on a Black woman's hair before a predominantly white audience.  

[shrug]

I'm old school. I grew up in a place that had fighting words, where violence was only looked down upon by the law if it was nonconsensual or someone really got hurt. So yeah, will agree maybe Will should've taken it private, but I got no issues with either him or Jada taking it there. 

 

---

Can really feel the white silliness lots of Black people are complaining about right now.

[IFR]

I mean, I agree with you that what was said is hurtful, but I don't know if that's even the worst kind of roasting these events have had. For my part, I don't understand why roasting is even a thing - it seems pointlessly mean in the first place, and a very delicate line to walk.

But at any rate, like you said, the appropriate way of addressing this would have been between the Smiths and Rock in private. This public farce was just obnoxious.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

 

[JGP]

I laughed when I got to Gosling.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

Groan. #toxicmasculinity is trending on twitter in the entertainment category. 

Been a while since we had a good dust up at the Oscars I recon. Not since Carol Burnett gave Sacheen Littlefeather a roundhouse kick to the solar plexus back in '73. 

True story. 

[BigFatCoward]

How is this even a conversation? People have been roasted far more than this without resorting to violence.  And it wasn't even about him. 

It was a rubbish and mean joke but that doesn't matter. 

[polishgenius]

Meh. I'm taking the Jamie Vardie route on this. It'd be another thing if he'd properly cold-clocked him - sucker punches aren't cool - but a wee lickle slap? He can take it.

 

 

And I mean I can totally appreciate the other view that he could totally have sorted that out without hitting him, but I don't think 'it wasn't about him' is a particularly good line of attack because standing up for your nearest and dearest is often much rawer than standing up for yourself.

[Ran]

Will Smith knew he acted inappropriately, as his speech shows, and all these people saying that it was actually fine are being absurd. It was not fine. It was classless. He shouldn't have done it.

The joke was in bad taste, as well, and shouldn't have been said. If Rock and Smith got into it backstage I wouldn't have been shocked. But to take the license of being big A-list Best Picture nominee Will Smith to step onto that stage uninvited, smack a man, and then walk down back to his seat as if nothing had happened and be allowed to remain... well, that's Hollywood at its worst. 

The correct response to that bad joke was to get up out of their seats and leave. The cameras would show them, everyone would know what they thought of Chris's joke, hell, some others there might have caught on and joined them to make the point louder. 

Actual class? Chris Rock. Took that slap like a champ, made a joke of it, defended his right to tell the damned joke (bad as it was), and carried on with the show. And then apparently declined to press charges against Smith, which he certainly had a right to do.

The whole saga of Will and Jada is a complicated and, from an outsider's perspective, a bizzare one. There's a lot going on in that relationship. So I'm not shocked by Smith flying off the handle.

ETA: In happier news, The Windshield Wiper took Best Animated Short! Alberto Mielgo, what a legend. 

[BigFatCoward]

He needs to move in with his aunty and uncle. 

[BigFatCoward]

2 minutes ago, Ran said:

 

Actual class? Chris Rock. Took that slap like a champ, made a joke of it, defended his right to tell the damned joke (bad as it was), and carried on with the show. And then apparently declined to press charges against Smith, which he certainly had a right to do.

 

Yep. Other than the joke itself, I literally don't know how he could have dealt with that any better.

[Isis]

2 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

He needs to move in with his aunty and uncle. 

Saw yesterday that Smith has ?directed a flipping Fresh Prince remake. KERCHING, huh?

As others have said, plenty of other ways to call someone out without getting physical. Bad example to set. 

In other news, I watched the first half of Spencer on the train to work this morning and so far I LOVE IT. Suffocating levels of claustrophobia and restriction. 

[polishgenius]

No-one's arguing that it was the best or classiest choice of action, it just doesn't matter very much. You all are acting as if he sucker-punched him. Yes of course he should have done something different but like... it's not that big a deal. 

The one argument I will concede is that not everyone who sees that will be as restrained (on either side) and so it's a bad example in one of the highest-profile events in the world, but then Will Smith is one of the most polished, image-aware and deliberately chill people in the industry so how riled must he have been on his wife's behalf to forget all that? 


Basically, what it comes down to for me is he is not a robot. Sometimes we lose our shit. 

[Ran]

4 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

You all are acting as if he sucker-punched him.

He kind of did. That deliberate walk while Rock is hanging forward to hear what he has to say, clearly expecting Smith to share an opinion, then bringing his arm up as he did was so he could give him no warning. 

If those were "fighting words", then Smith should have let Rock know rather than pretending he was just going to have some words.

It's an assault, in the end. An assault he did in front of millions of people, and then he just got to go back to his seat, the show carried on as if nothing had happened, and he got the big award. It's a proverbial black eye for Smith's reputation, for the Academy, and for Hollywood in general.

[Heartofice]

It's pretty shocking, but what it really shows to me is that Will Smiths family life is pretty tempestuous, and that his emotional state has not always been the calm and together image he likes to project. This didn't really surprise me all that much tbh.

It was a really bad joke though, I don't see why Rock made it, I don't know how close him and Smith are, if there is any history there that we aren't seeing. 

The best I can say about Smith though, is that he does come across as human and I get why hes emotional, and at least he used an open hand slap rather than a full on fist crack to the face.