A Very Strange Oscars: Will Smith And The "Slap Seen Around The World" - Breaking It Down
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Oscars 2022: A moment so absolutely over the top could not be anything but staged could it? Turns out, it could.
Will Smith was having the Oscars of his life – as frontrunner for Best Actor – until he began having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Oscars and then went right back to having the best Oscars ever. In a story that could easily have been a film plot, he was both the hero and the villain of the 94th Academy Awards that were held in Los Angeles. The short version – Will slapped Chris Rock over a joke about wife Jada and then won an Oscar. The long version below – here is how Slapgate, or "the slap seen around the world" as it's become known on social media, went down. We are all Lupita. #Oscar#AcademyAward#Oscars2022#LupitaNyongo#WillSmith#ChrisRock#willsmithchrisrockpic.twitter.com/fatRR4DybB Will Smith owes Chris Rock a huge apology. There is no excuse for what he did. He's lucky Chris is not filing assault charges. The excuses he made tonight were bullshit. Violence isn't ok. Assault is never the answer. Also? This is the 2nd time that Chris has made fun of Jada on the #Oscars stage, & tonight he went after her alopecia. Punching down at someone's auto-immune disease is wrong. Doing so on purpose is cruel. They both need a breather. And That's How We Do It The Academy does not condone violence of any form.Tonight we are delighted to celebrate our 94th Academy Awards winners, who deserve this moment of recognition from their peers and movie lovers around the world.
The first thing to know is that Jada Pinkett suffers from alopecia, a condition that causes hair loss and because of which she wears her hair almost shaved down to the scalp. Jada revealed in 2018 that she has alopecia and has described it as “terrifying” to deal with.
Maybe presenter Chris Rock didn't know that Jada's bald head is not her look by choice; maybe he did know and decided to joke about it anyway. “Jada, can't wait for GI Jane 2,” he quipped – GI Jane is a reference to a 90s film in which Demi Moore stars as a female Navy SEAL and in which she wears her hair closely cropped as SEALs do.
