WARNING: NSFW LANGUAGE, this the unedited clip from last night which features s-words (swords) and f-words. If you let the man control you and aren’t allowed to watch these at school or work please note this disclaimer. I have disclaimed:
So Linds and I went to dinner last night and just popped on the Oscars for a little bit when we got home. I intended to half pay attention to it for about 20 minutes before going to bed. In that 20 minute time frame, this happened.
Now again, I wasn’t fully watching it until I noticed that ABC was dumping audio and they showed Will Smith after he sat back down and he was clearly f-wording something and looked pretty serious. Up until the dumping of the audio, I figured this was all a work. Choreographed. Orchestrated to drum up some ratings which have been DISMAL for the Oscar’s over the past few years. I don’t know, maybe it’s the fact that I grew up on 80’s and 90’s WWF, but this had Vince McMahon written all over it. But the audio ‘dump’ gave me a moment of pause, then the expression on Will Smith’s face afterwards, and then I saw the above unedited video getting shared all over Twitter.
Make no mistake: That was 1,000% real. You can tell by the tone of Will Smith’s voice, you can tell by Chris Rock’s reaction and how rattled he is initially, you can tell by the audience going deathly silent. Real, real, real.
The aftermath of this slap has divided the internet into two camps:
Camp #1): Apparently Jada Pinkett Smith suffers from alopecia, and has been vocal about it since she was diagnosed in 2018. She was clearly not happy with the joke and even though Will was laughing initially, he saw her reaction and that’s what set this train on the tracks. People think the joke was tasteless and are applauding Will Smith for defending his wife’s honor.
Camp #2): Chris Rock is a comedian, Will Smith is an actor/comedian, both have been in the limelight for almost 3 decades, this was a MAJOR overreaction to what was at worst a bad joke*. You can’t just go around smacking people like Rick James because you don’t like what they said. This is a society, we’re supposed to act in a civilized way. It’s not like Jada’s life was threatened or his kid’s lives were threatened, it was a joke, and a joke that was apparently rehearsed the day before with no issue.
What was truly wild was that about 5 minutes later, Will Smith accepted the Oscar for Best Actor, one of the biggest awards of the night. He had a meandering/rambling speech about how he’s a vessel for love literally 500 seconds after he slapped Chris Rock in the mouth. He would have been better served to just do this:
Reports are that LAPD did show up at the event and that Chris Rock declined to press charges. Credit to Chris Rock: He ate that slap like Joe Krabbenhoft. He kept segment moving forward. Also: Listen to Rock at the 1:07 mark of that video. ‘Oh I could…..okay.’ You KNOW he had a line ready there that would have escalated this thing to a full-on Pier 6 brawl. I would pay big money to know what that line was going to be.
Anyway, quite a night at the Oscar’s! It at least provided me with a distraction from the the fact that Duke is probably going to win the national title in Coach K’s final season and the Packers don’t have any wide receivers.
*It was also somewhat amusing reading all of the tweets from people under the age of 30 that have no clue what that joke even was in reference to.
PS: ‘That was the craziest slap I’ve ever seen on TV!’ Ummmmm, how about no:
Comments