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Smith Wouldn’t Have Slapped Anyone

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…if the house-sized Jason Momoa or Dwayne Johnson had been presenting the Best Feature Documentary Oscar. Will Smith would have just sat there and smirked and shrugged it off if one of these two guys had made a GI Jane 2 joke. Because as big as Smith is, these guys are bigger and stronger and he wouldn’t have wanted to flirt with getting stomped. But he knew he could slap Chris Rock and walk away unscathed, and so he did.

This was an observation shared by Howard Stern this morning…Stern’s thought, not mine. And an accurate one.

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Sasha + Critical Drinker on Smith-Rock Slapdown

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“The reactions [to the slap], strangely enough, appear to be mixed. Remember, this was an altercation between two Black men, at a time in the Academy’s history where the entire film community is striving to change things for artists of color. So the reaction to Will Smith has been, I think, more muted than it would have been if, say, Bradley Cooper slapped Kevin Costner. Then you’d have long agonizing think pieces about white male privilege and toxic masculinity.

“But what we’re seeing today appears to be a much more somber reception, except for all of the people making fun of it and there are a lot of those too, mostly the people who truly loathe Hollywood and the Oscars (and there are a lot of those too).” — from Sasha Stone‘s “The 94th Oscars — Wild, Weird, Awful and Wonderful.”

Critical Drinker: “Is this gonna tarnish the reputation of Hollywood, or enhance it? What’s actually gonna happen is that more people are gonna tune into next year’s Oscars in the hopes of catching a similar confrontation.”

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Oscar Viewers Surged to 15 Million Last Night

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Still in the toilet but at least they defied Richard Rushfield’s prediction (or morbid suspicion) that they might drop below last year’s calamitous tally of 10 million viewers. And after Will Smith’s bitch-slapping of Chris Rock you know that a certain low-rent sector of the public will tune in next year in hopes of something similar happening. Onward and upward!

Smoking Cigarettes or Joints?

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For one-third of a second I thought “oh, great!…Bill and Quentin are gonna jump into the Will Smith thing!” But of course, no…this was taped two or three weeks ago. But getting ripped together or even just smoking tobacco and maybe sharing a drink…”guys letting their hair down with the aid of mood-altering stimulants”…this is a good idea.

Now The Academy Understands

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…how to save the Oscars, at least in terms of ratings. Will Smith may be an overly coddled rich bitch grappling with inner demons (or, as David Poland put it, “an uber-wealthy, entitled, pampered, self-indulgent punk”) but last night he broke through all the pretense and decorum and just said “fuck it, ahm gonna whack Chris across the chops!”

And suddenly the show no longer seemed stricken with woke cancer…well, it was and still is, but Smith gave it a shot of mad, unruly, West Philadelphia energy and thereby gave everyone a reason to go “good God, he may be an entitled animal but that sure was fun to watch and re-watch, and loads of fun to kvetch and moralize about!”

Plus the Academy Museum (“Woke House”) suddenly has a new idea for a killer exhibit that will attract tourists by tens of thousands.

Matt Walsh commentary link…

My Thought Exactly

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I too was immediately…uhm, puzzled when Daniel Kaaluya and H.E.R. strolled onto the Oscar stage last night with Toto’s “Africa,” of all the songs in all the world, providing tuneful accompaniment.

Context Is All

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You can take the man out of West Philadelphia, but you can’t take West Philadelphia out of the man. In a flash, all the self-supporting facades and belief systems that we’ve wrapped around ourselves can just disintegrate and suddenly we’re 16 again…

He Who Gets Slapped

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Tatiana admires what she regards as a “man’s man” — strong, decisive, two-fisted, Will Smith-like.

Not long after Smith slapped Chris Rock on the Oscar stage and a little while after we’d both watched and re-watched videos of the incident, Tatiana wanted to know if I was a real man by the standards of Smith or Vladimir Putin — if I would have the cojones to stride onto the main stage of the Comedy Store, say, and slug a comedian if he had insulted her in some way.

My answer boiled down to “no, I would not slug the comedian onstage in front of an audience.” But we would have stern words in private after he’d completed his set. I would admonish him for being callous or thoughtless and I would insist upon a civil apology, but no, I would not follow the Putin playbook by slugging him or kicking him in the balls or forcing a cyanide capsule into his mouth and holding his jaw shut.

“Are you a man? Do you know what a real man is?” came her response.

“I’m not a tough, two-fisted Russian husband, I can tell you that,” I said, “and I’ve never felt so proud of myself as I am this very moment. So no, I am not a face-slapping kind of guy, certainly not in public and in full view of a paying audience.

“So I am not Will Smith, and thank you very much for allowing me to make things clear in this regard. I don’t tolerate cruelty or hurting a woman’s feelings or in any way humiliating her in front of others, but I do believe in settling things outside and privately, face to face and eyeball to eyeball.”