Update: Will Smith has been banned from the Academy events or the Oscars for ten years. He will keep his Oscar and still be eligible for nominations and wins, per the Hollywood Reporter.
Warning: What I am about to write will shock some of you. It will likely send some of you cascading into fits of rage or fury or anger. It might alienate people – but like Bill Murray says in Tootsie, I can’t think of anything that I haven’t already said on this site. I try to be as honest with you as I can. I do this for two reasons. The first, I think there is not enough honesty anywhere right now. People are too afraid. The second is that I don’t have much to lose by this point.
So let’s get to it, shall we? Hopefully you will respect me in the morning.
Words are not harm. Walking up to someone at the Oscars and slapping them across the face is harm. Will Smith humiliated Chris Rock, and I will never get the look of Rock’s face afterward out of my mind. I was there. I watched the whole thing go down and I remain angry at Smith for what he did, not just to Rock, but to everyone who accepted an award that night. The only thing people will remember about the 94th Oscars, or the Oscars probably for the rest of their lives, is that Will Smith once slapped Chris Rock on live television. If the slap had never happened, Rock would have taken heat, raked over the coals for days, and been forced to apologize. But instead what we all saw on Oscar Night was narcissism of the highest order. It was a man blowing up the best night of his life. It was a mistake. A crack in the otherwise pristine façade of one of our gods, Will Smith.
All of that can be true, and he would still be deserving of his award. Why, because he is not being given the award because he is a good person. No one sitting in that theater that night, except Jude Hill, is without sin. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone. People say things they wish they didn’t. They hurt people they wish they didn’t. Maybe they once lied and never corrected the lie. Maybe they once stole something from someone without crediting them – a story idea, a boyfriend. This is all before you get to the natural world, factory farming and the treatment of animals, exploiting workers in third world countries, pollution, our unending demand for energy, bullying others online in real life, food waste, etc. We are not perfect. We never have been. We are not all good or all bad, but a combination of the two that we wrestle with every day. The most sickening thing I’ve watched go down among the most privileged at the hands of social media is their projecting themselves as saintly each day.
This is especially true in how far too many in the white community try to use people of color to redeem themselves. Granted, they are forced into it because they are now ordered to be “good allies.” They can’t just be themselves. They have to virtue signal each and every day to prove their worth, to prove they aren’t racists. Many of them (of us) live with this nervous façade every single day in everything we do, whether it’s walking down the street and passing someone who isn’t white, or writing a post like this one, or tweeting. The white guilt is omnipresent. That comes from the need to both BE good and to be thought of as good. But guess what? Even with all of that, what we have all built for ourselves in our desperate need over the past five years to prove our worth by proving our goodness disguises our inherent universal flaws as people.
I see people upset that Louis CK won a Grammy. But here’s a shock. He won it not for being a good person or never having made a mistake. He won it because he’s FUNNY. He’s gifted with being funny, probably because he isn’t perfect, and he’s wrestled with demons. Here’s the one that always gets me into trouble and has for years: No matter how mad people are at Roman Polanski, nothing will ever make Chinatown not a masterpiece. He is a talented filmmaker regardless of something very terrible he did in his past.
You see, not only can you separate the art from the artist — you MUST — if you actually understand what art is. That doesn’t mean you yourself ever have to watch Chinatown (it’s your loss). Or listen to a Louis CK standup routine (I did recently, and I never laughed so hard — I forgot how people can actually be funny now, especially when they have nothing to lose). You have the right to curate your own emotional experience. But when it comes to awards, if you expect your award to be worth anything, you don’t give them to people because they are “good” — born good or behaving well. You give them to people because they deserve them FOR THE WORK.
I have never agreed with the threat of taking away an Oscar because of someone’s behavior. I prefer an Academy and an industry that does not police morality. It isn’t anyone’s job to police morality, least of all show business people.
I have been consistent as I watched the Left side of this country fall victim to mass hysteria after Trump won. This was, I know, an effort to hang onto the America we built after Obama’s 8 years in office. Trump disrupted, insulted and knocked down everything we built. We thought the country was ours. Turns out we have to share it with 60 million people that don’t agree with our version of it. That was like the Devil riding into Salem, I think. It has caused us to be paranoid, to turn on each other, and to destroy those we believe break our rules.
But blending morality with art turns the whole business into something resembling the Catholic church. Essentially, the era of the Hays Code (the early 30s) is now being repeated; only it’s the formerly liberal side that is doing it. This means art is, as we speak, constantly policed to determine the fate of its creators. What films are about, who makes them, who stars in them – there is a need to continually curate our utopia to make sure it complies with the doctrine of the New Left, which is intersectional, inoffensive, etc.
Along with that kind of policing, though, comes suffocation. It is no wonder that the films of the 1950s are what they are. The morality police had squeezed all human imperfection out of them as they sought to depict a kind of utopian Americana. By the 1960s and 1970s, though, it was upended and destroyed during the counter-culture revolution, the Black Power and Civil Rights movements, the feminist movement, etc. That revolution reshaped American culture completely. Now, however, it has reversed itself. The same side that once broke through the rigidity of the 1950s has itself become rigid, moralistic, strident, and puritanical in all ways.
I will also just add that I have been physically and sexually abused. I know how it feels to be a victim. I am though, at heart, an artist, and someone who appreciates art. While it is possible to draw the line in extreme cases like Adolf Hitler’s paintings or Charles Manson’s music — no matter how good their work was (it wasn’t), their crimes obliterate anything else about them. That is not true with many of those who have been purged and ostracized in recent years. Moreover, there always has to be a path to forgiveness and redemption. That is why we have due process and rule of law. No society can function if we are purging undesirables on a regular basis and giving them no path back to acceptance. This is just my own personal view. I understand many do not agree with me.
I agree that what Will Smith did was wrong. But he is going to suffer a far worse punishment than losing his Oscar. Not only will he never be nominated again, not only will it take him years to build back his career – if he ever can — but he has to live with having made a terrible mistake. I think that is punishment enough.
Will Smith gave the best male performance of the year, and he deserves to keep his Oscar.