How does it seem fair that a person with a rape case against him gets a standing ovation and an honorary award but a guy with a spotless career for almost 30 years get banned from the Academy?
The Oscars is always the event that grips everyone by their throats even weeks after it premieres. And this year’s show was everything to make up for the Covid slack.
The red carpet outfits did serve and some amazing wins came in like a whiff of fresh air to the monotony of overrated repetitive winners.
But what certainly took the Oscar for the most dramatic incident to ever happen at an award show was the iconic “slap” incident.
The Oscars, or any other award show for that matter, often have their hosts on stage taking fun jabs at the audience during their skits. Although they are claimed to be meant for light comedic purposes, sometimes the jokes do go a tad bit too far.
Continuing with this legacy of on-stage stand-ups, Chris Rock, a comedian did a skit onstage during which he offhandedly made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith, the wife of Will Smith over her hair. It’s been almost a century of the Oscars persisting in Hollywood and they should know better than to include a tone-deaf joke, especially considering the medical conditions Jada has been going through. And naturally, Will Smith felt the urge to defend, and although quite a violent approach the Oscars surely got an answer for their offhanded hurtful comments veiled under the weak excuses of jokes.
The only thing people could ever talk about for the coming weeks (and are still talking about) after these prestigious academy awards was the “Slap”.
Netizens were quick to jump to online discussions theorizing on the rights and wrongs, the funny and the unfunny of the incident. The internet did not even take a whole day before it was flooded with memes, jokes, and whatnot.
While the story of what happened and why it happened is not our business to figure out the rights and wrongs in, the aftermath of what happened surely is. Especially whatever official and unofficial declarations were made on the sides of the various actors present on the day there as well as the statements the Academy released.
While it is an agreeable fact that violence is never the option and surely, what Will Smith did was inappropriate to some extent, to which he rightfully posted a public apology. But the repercussions he faced for it seemed to go much further than just a call for accountability.
What came in next was something that perked up ears and was clearly a by-product of the systemic racism and bigotry hidden behind the glamours of the Hollywood curtains. Will Smith did not only face backlash from the media and all his co-actors but there were also many steps taken to virtually blacklist him from the Hollywood community. There were talks of the Academy taking back his first Oscar in his almost 40 years of acting career with claims of violence and “misconduct”. He was taken out from almost all of his upcoming roles and the last nail in the coffin was the Oscars banning him from the event for the next ten years on grounds of violation of the code of conduct of the Academy.
All of this would have still been acceptable if it were all not so abysmally visible to all of us how this is not just about a random incident that could have been as easily disposed of as the bad jokes from the Oscars.
The blatant fact that the Academy has still given a free pass to literal abusers and rapists with time and even turned a blind eye to them standing on stage accepting their awards while there was an actual legal case going on against them. During the 2003 Oscars Roman Polanski, a director who was later banned from the USA due to sexual misconduct allegations on a case that had been running since the 1970s, got a standing ovation and an honorary award ceremony after the Oscars event, yet a slap from a guy with a near clean record for almost 30 years loses his career over the prominent lack of good jokes on the Oscars’ side?
It is instances like these which remind us that there is still a long way to go for the world to stop seeing anyone who is not a cishet white male with anything but doubt and contempt. When we say the fight for equal rights and a healthy environment free from any discrimination is a still a long way to go; it does not only mean the blatant killings of people of color or the straightforward harm to the marginalized communities, it is also these subtle but deep-rooted evils that we talk about. The dignity of an individual is not just their right to live, but also the right to live in an environment that would let them hold their honor and stand their ground in their fight for the right to defend it.