Can Will Smith ever be forgiven? One year on from the Oscars slap

Has a slap ever made so much noise? The funny thing is —well, one of the funny things — the slap itself was actually pretty quiet. I am, of course, talking about last year’s Oscars, when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock for making an off-the-cuff joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, for having a bald head, which she shaves due to alopecia. As well as creating one of the most memed moments to date, Smith definitively staked out “slap” as his property; the word now only refers to him and the night he shredded his reputation and career.

At the Oscars tonight the ripples from that single moment will continue to radiate, most obviously in the endless slap jokes that this year’s presenter, Jimmy Kimmel, will inevitably — and rightly — make. Although I reckon the Oscars missed a trick and Rock should be presenting the whole event while wearing a neck brace, shadowed by bodyguards.

But the Academy has never been known for having a sense of humour about itself, which is partly why it has been so consistently lead-footed at dealing with anything more taxing than questions about whether this year’s best actress is wearing Dior or Valentino.

I have been covering the event for 15 years, so have seen an Oscars snafu or two, from the all-white nominees list leading to the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag in 2015 to the supremely stupid Moonlight/La La Land best picture mix-up in 2017. But last year’s really took the golden statuette. As well as the sheer weirdness of Smith’s behaviour, which he had until then managed to keep hidden despite living in the spotlight since he was a teenager, as a study of corporate ineptitude it was laughable.

I was in the Dolby Theatre that night, sitting not very far behind the Smiths, and it defies comprehension that no one backstage intervened at any point. It is even more ludicrous that Smith was allowed to stay in the theatre and, minutes later, go up on stage to accept his best actor award (for King Richard) and give what was — by some measure — the oddest acceptance speech of all time. Several days later the Academy announced that Smith was banned from the event for the next decade. (“Is that a punishment or a prize?” quoth a million wits.)

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Hollywood loves a comeback, though, so can Smith — or the Oscars for that matter — come back from this shambles?

In regards to Smith, the answer so far is no. He is so far out in the cold he probably has hypothermia. His most blatant bid for Oscars glory in his career, Emancipation, in which he plays a slave and which was made before Slapgate, has been ignored in awards season. He has not been working on anything over the past year except his increasingly bizarre apologies. He has become, it seems, something of an embarrassment in the industry.

Rock, by contrast, is very much back in the spotlight after finally talking about the slap in a Netflix special, Selective Outrage, last week. “Did it hurt? Yeah, motherf***er, it hurt,” he said, letting his still palpable anger fly. “I know you can’t tell on camera, but Will Smith is significantly bigger than me . . . Will Smith played Muhammed Ali in a movie. Do you think I auditioned for that part?” He also went after Pinkett Smith, saying she “started” the fight between him and Smith, which may have some merit. She and Rock have — as Rock explains in his special — history, and it was notable on Oscars night that Smith initially laughed at Rock’s joke, but quickly changed tack when he saw his wife’s furious expression.

In any case Pinkett Smith’s possibly not entirely heartfelt plea, which she made in June, that “these two intelligent, capable men have an opportunity to heal, talk this out and reconcile. The state of the world today, we need them both” is unlikely to be fulfilled any time soon.

The world will have to cope. It’s too soon to tell whether the public’s sympathy will, at last, entirely tip Rock’s way, but the wide interest in his version shows that people definitely want to hear his side of things.

As for the Oscars, tonight is the Academy’s big test. It has assembled what it calls a “crisis team” that, like a superhero from the latest Marvel franchise, will be “prepared for anything”, according to the new chief executive, Bill Kramer, swooping in to resolve all possible disasters. Which is fortunate, because it had to be deployed almost two months before the event.

When the nominations were announced in January there was an immediate outcry against Andrea Riseborough’s surprise best actress nomination for the tiny independent film To Leslie. Not because she’s bad in it —she’s not, she’s actually terrific — but because two other actresses, Viola Davis (for The Woman King) and Danielle Deadwyler (Till), who had wealthy studios working to encourage their nominations, were overlooked, and it was assumed that Riseborough had taken the place of one of them. One way to look at this would be to say that it’s marvellous that an actress can get a nomination without the machinery of a big studio campaign behind her. Another is to say it’s horribly racist that a white actress got a nomination when two black ones did not. Guess which narrative dominated the coverage?

Some said that Riseborough had cheated because To Leslie’s director, Michael Morris, and his wife, the TV actress Mary McCormack, had encouraged their A-lister friends, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston and Frances Fisher, to post on social media about her performance. It’s hard to see how this is more unfair — or effective — than the usual Oscars campaign, which involves studios paying for giant billboards to line Sunset Boulevard, then trotting the celebrities out to the industry events where they schmooze those in charge. A few Instagram posts? Please.

The Academy crisis team agreed and Riseborough’s nomination has been allowed to stand. But this is very far from the first time the Oscars has been accused of, if not outright racism, then at least a kind of cluelessness about race, which is one reason why the story took flight. It doesn’t help either that Smith — whom the Academy surely had once envisaged as being a big part of this year’s ceremony: a high-profile black Oscar winner — won’t be anywhere near the event this year to refute any charges of Oscars whiteness.

It is hard, though, not to agree with the American commentator Ben Dreyfuss, who wrote in January that the reason the anti-Riseborough sentiment took such root is because it’s being disseminated by studio publicists, who are miffed that their usual efforts to get their actresses nominated didn’t work and are scared that they are becoming redundant, given that an actress can get nominated with a little help from social media instead of a PR campaign.

So it would be understandable for the Academy to be feeling a little nervous about tonight. And yet it should take heart. All this focus on the Oscars — is it too white? Too out of touch? — only proves how much interest there still is in the event, no matter what theviewing figures are.

No one cares who gets nominated for a Screen Actors’ Guild award. The Emmys? Whatever. The Oscars are still, despite everything, the gold standard, and, as the many superheroes in Hollywood these days might say, with great power comes great responsibility. And maybe an occasional slap.