The Academy Awards 2022 will go down in the annals with probably the biggest shocking moment in the entire 94-year history of the Oscars – a targeted, powerful, unbridled slap in the face of comedian Chris Rock. The actor Will Smith landed it, and the audience at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles were so surprised that there was a moment of paralyzing silence in the hall.
No one suspected evil when Chris Rock stepped up in a rather sluggish moment of the show to announce best documentary. Before that, however, he threw in a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith, who was sitting next to her nominated husband, Will Smith, at the front of the auditorium – with a distinctively shaved head. Rock said the look allowed her to star in the girls-to-guns movie GI Jane, in which Demi Moore sported the same hairstyle. Not a particularly good joke, but not a brutal one for the uninitiated either.
Pinkett Smith reacted in agony and rolled his eyes, Will Smith seemed to be laughing too. But then he got up, marched briskly onto the stage and, without a moment’s hesitation, slapped Rock’s face with his flat hand – with force, in the replay you can see Rock’s head flying backwards. Nevertheless, at first nobody knew whether the moment should not be played, part of the show.
“Now we carry on with love”
Smith sat down again, Chris Rock commented on the whole thing very surprised and a bit shaky – but in a way that it could still be part of a planned moment. But then Will Smith yelled twice, “Keep my wife’s name out your fucking mouth.” Muted in the US but audible in the rest of the world.
Then the show went on, the next laudator was the musician P. Diddy, who indirectly confirmed that a real argument had broken out. “Will, Chris, we’ll work this out as a family at the gold party later,” he said. “Now let’s move on with love.”
Very soon, the fact that not everyone – probably not even Chris Rock – was aware that Jada Pinkett Smith wore her hairstyle for a special reason got around. As she made public in 2018, she suffers from autoimmune hair loss, which may have provoked Smith’s violent reaction. It was reported from behind the scenes that Rock apologized and Denzel Washington tried to smooth things over between the two men.
Smith apologizes to the Academy but not to Chris Rock
The apotheosis of it all came when Will Smith won the Oscar for best actor for the movie “King Richard” half an hour later, got back on stage and very quickly burst into tears. “I have to be a fearless protector of my family these days,” he said. “It’s one of the things that God lets me do.” He then lamented, “We’re supposed to be able to put up with being verbally abused. We’re supposed to be able to put up with people saying crazy things about us. In this business, we’re supposed to be able to put up with people disrespecting us and we’re supposed to be laughing and pretending be it okay.”
He then apologized to the Academy and to his fellow nominees, but not to Chris Rock. His acceptance speech was also about the man who he embodied in “King Richard”. – Richard Williams, the father of the two black tennis legends Venus and Serena Williams, who sat in the audience and applauded with emotion.
Richard Williams, Smith said, was also a fearless protector of his family, according to the film’s thesis that it was his aggressiveness that made his daughters’ world success possible in the first place. “Now art imitates life,” Smith sobbed. “Now I look like the crazy dad myself. But love makes us do crazy things.” He then revealed what his colleague Denzel Washington had said to him in the moment after the blow to prevent worse things from happening. “Be careful, Will. This is your highest moment – and this is the moment when the devil wants to get hold of you.”