DC Film Society: Adam's Rib April 2022

More Than a Slap

At first, I thought it was a joke, a bit where Will Smith would pretend to slap Chris Rock. My wife caught on first and told me the slap was real. The Oscars proved her right by cutting the audio for the next few seconds, while Smith shouted at Rock. Like so many others we quickly went online to see the unedited feed. We were watching at the Arlington Cinema N Drafthouse at the DC Film Society’s Oscars Party, and I can safely say that everyone in the room sat there stunned. Just five years ago we witnessed the chaos ensuing from Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announcing that La La Land won Best Picture when it was actually Moonlight. At least that fiasco was an accident coming from a distracted accountant handing the presenters the wrong envelope. This time the meltdown came from very intentional acts.

The outburst proved so shocking in part because it came from Smith, one of the seemingly warmer and likable celebrities for more than 30 years. Consider the others where if you heard they had hit someone at the Oscars you would have thought “Yeah I can see that.” Frank Sinatra not only won an Oscar but hosted the ceremony. He instigated plenty of fights throughout his career. Nick Nolte’s whole demeanor and arrest record would have made him a likely candidate. And if you told me that I had to bet all of my money on either Sean Penn or Will Smith slapping someone at the Oscars, I’d be broke today. Think of other infamous Oscar incidents. In 1975 producers Peter Davis and Bert Schneider brought greetings from the Viet Cong government. In 1978 Vanessa Redgrave spoke of “Zionist hoodlums” during her acceptance speech. None of them were slapped. But Will Smith slapped Chris Rock because of a G.I. Jane joke.

I’ll readily admit that if Chris Rock knew that Jada Pinkett Smith suffered from alopecia, then he shouldn’t have made the joke. As of this writing we don’t know if Rock was aware or not. Regardless, the joke was so mild audiences would have forgotten it in five minutes had nothing happened afterwards. It was that Jada Pinkett Smith looked a little like a strong heroine from a 25-year-old movie that has long since faded from the cultural discourse. Nothing about the joke justified Smith’s actions or those foolish people looking for a moral equivalency between Smith and Rock. Smith, who laughed at the joke initially, could have just shouted something. Better yet, he could have sought out Rock after the show and demanded he not tell that type of joke again. A verbal slight justifies a verbal response, not a physical one.

The larger question remains why Team Oscar responded so weakly to Smith’s actions. Many journalists and other observers figured that the producers wanted audiences to see Smith accept the Best Actor Oscar everyone knew was coming his way. That reasoning would have put short-term attention over long-term credibility. Smith deserved his Oscar, which he earned through his skill and hard work long before the slap (and I disagree with those who argue it should be revoked. Last time I checked Kevin Spacey and Roman Polanski still have their Oscars). But Smith did not deserve to command the stage for five minutes to praise himself for all the people he supposedly protected. He did not deserve the chance to compare himself to Richard Williams who, for all his faults, did not do what Smith did. The presenter could have read his name and accepted the award on his behalf. You know who did deserve the attention? Questlove, who, minutes after the slap, received the Best Documentary Oscar for Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). Questlove gave a moving and thoughtful speech about what music and his family meant to him, but no one cared.

A couple of days later the Academy claimed that the producers did in fact ask Smith to leave, but Smith refused. If that’s true it’s an even more damning indictment. He was “asked to leave?” How exactly did that go?

“Mr. Smith, could you please leave the ceremony?”
“No”
“We’d really like it if you would.”
“No”
“Pretty please?”
“$%*&& you! I said no!”
“OK, never mind. Just thought I’d ask. By the way, I loved you in Bad Boys for Life.”

Many years ago, I was kicked out of a bar for something much less damaging then hitting someone. No one politely asked me to leave. A big dude got right in my face and told me I was leaving. Allowing Smith to stay and have his moment of glory smacks of so many negative Hollywood stereotypes: elitism, double standards, hypocrisy. The damage is done. The Academy is reportedly investigating the incident, although I don’t see what there is to investigate. Everyone saw what happened. The “investigation” is just buying the Academy some time. Hopefully this time will allow the Academy leaders to stiffen their spines. At a bare minimum the Academy should suspend Smith for several years. He should not be allowed to attend the Oscars during that time, even if he is nominated. Anything less would be the Academy continuing to let popularity trump everything else.

In a strange way, the slap gave the Oscar producers a break by focusing attention away from their misguided decisions. They confined eight of the craft categories to before the live show, recording the acceptance speeches and clumsily fitting it into the telecast. This choice understandably infuriated these craftsmen and women. The Oscars are the one chance the best in their fields have for a worldwide spotlight, and while that was not completely gone, it was greatly diminished. The guilds representing those eight categories all strongly criticized the decision and asked that it be reversed. So did many luminaries, including Steven Spielberg, Guillermo Del Toro and James Cameron. But the Oscar show producers wouldn’t budge. They claimed they were under express orders from ABC, the longtime network of the Oscars, to keep the show at three hours. Guess what? Even with these changes the show came in at three hours and 39 minutes. The Oscars managed to piss off large segments of the film community and it was all for nothing.

The larger problem is not so much that the Academy failed to meet its goals, but that these were the wrong goals in the first place. The producers bent over backwards to target the widest possible audience, particularly younger viewers. I can imagine the production meeting where someone said “These kids all love Twitter. Let’s set up a Twitter poll so we can mention fan favorites that weren’t nominated. And even though they love Twitter they will watch the show to find out what won (instead of finding it out on the same Twitter feed that they used to vote in the first place). There’s no way this can go wrong!” In a development that anyone could see coming, fanboys and bots swamped the poll, so that the number one “Cheer-worthy” moment in film history became The Flash entering the speed force in Zack Snyder’s Justice League and the number one film of 2021 was Army of the Dead, directed by . . . Zack Snyder. So this meaningless mess of Snyder got more air time than some of the real winners.

What else did they include instead of broadcasting all the awards live? First, they offered a 60th anniversary James Bond tribute. Not really necessary, as the Oscars paid tribute 10 years ago for the 50th anniversary. But what’s wrong with honoring 007? Plenty when done like this. Instead of bringing out any of the surviving actors who played Bond to present, the show gave us skater Tony Hawk, surfer Kelly Slater, and snowboarder Shaun White. Not only do they have no ties to Bond, they barely have any connection with movies at all! Judi Dench, who played Bond’s boss M in seven movies, was right there in the audience. How do you screw this one up?

The Bond mess was just a prelude to the Oscars completely botching The Godfather 50th anniversary tribute. This was one I was anticipating for a while. Rumors had Francis Ford Coppola and the surviving Godfather stars appearing at the end to present Best Picture. Instead, well before the end, Sean Combs, who had no affiliation whatsoever with the film or its sequels, presented the tribute. Then along with Coppola it was Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. Normally I’d be thrilled to see those three legends together. But where was James Caan, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall or Talia Shire? DeNiro was not in the first Godfather, but rather the sequel. He would have been a fitting presenter of the others. The cherry on top came during the clips, when the background music shifted from the magnificent Godfather score to some rap songs. For the record, not only was there no rap in The Godfather, that form of music didn’t even exist when the film was made. What should have elicited fond memories and appreciation instead drew a “What the hell are they doing?!”

Clearly the extreme sports stars, Combs, the Twitter contest, and the rap music are all part of the attempts to reverse declining Oscar ratings. That’s also why the showrunners felt they had to feature two songs from Encanto when only one was nominated. To some degree the plan succeeded. The ratings were up considerably from 2021, but that year was during the darkest days of the pandemic. 2022 still had the second-lowest ratings of any Oscar telecast in history. The Academy needs to face the truth that the ratings are never going to rebound to the glory days when Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, or Billy Crystal hosted. The Oscars are already hurt by the endless stream of precursor awards that make the Oscars feel more like the end of a long road than a bright shining moment. The entertainment landscape is too fragmented. Ratings in general go down each year except for NFL games and occasionally the NBA. Much of the population, including young people, don’t watch the Oscars, and they are simply not going to do it. Ever.

I’ve loved the Oscars not because I usually agreed with who was nominated and who won. Often, I took issue with many of the choices. I’ve complained at length and sometimes in writing about Oscar snubbing who should have been honored. No, I loved the Oscars because it was a celebration of film and the people who made them. It meant something to me when Martin Scorsese won after all those years. Years earlier my mother screamed when her favorite Paul Newman got his long overdue recognition. I’ve joked that no obituary reads “Two-time MTV award winner so-and-so died today.” The Oscars still have that cache, for now anyway.

By futilely chasing people who won’t watch, the Academy is ignoring the core audience of movie lovers. That disturbing pattern already started in 2009, when the Academy chose to remove the lifetime achievement award winners from the main telecast and put them in another ceremony that’s not televised or even livestreamed. Diminishing nomination categories, bringing in celebrities with little or no connection with movies, and ridiculous Twitter contests all water down what the Oscars should be. I and other cinephiles may not abandon the Oscars just yet, but the more the ceremony strays from honoring film the more likely we may one day think its not worth our time. Then the Academy would not have its target or its core audience.

If the Academy truly wants to bring in younger viewers, the way to do it is by cultivating a new legion of film lovers, and it can’t do that by diluting what the Oscars should stand for. If the Academy can’t rediscover who they are, the question for future ceremonies won’t be whether anyone gets slapped. It will be whether anyone cares.

Adam Spector
April 1, 2022