The Quarterback Slaps the Class Clown
The now infamous Will Smith Slap is no different than the standard high school hierarchy in play
I stopped watching the Oscar ceremony when the Academy, in an effort to gain more eyeballs, expanded the Best Picture category to ten films instead of the standard five. This year was no different.
The night before, my wife and I, both huge Paul Thomas Anderson fans, decided to rent Licorice Pizza. PTA had directed three of my top 25 films (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love) so I was excited to see it. My wife didn't make it through the first hour and went into the next room to read instead. I stuck it out and was so disappointed I was visibly upset. I decided to watch an episode of the CBS crime procedural FBI because I knew with that I would get 45 minutes of decent storytelling, compelling characters, and professional looking cinematography.
The next afternoon (Oscar night) we headed to Henderson, NV to have some drinks and BBQ with some friends. Two of my buddies and I were out in the back yard talking about movies we loved that no one else seemed to when I got a text from my friend and the co-host of a podcast I'm a part of—I Like to Watch—he wanted me to know that he was watching and it was as dull an lifeless as he expected.
I tapped back a laugh. A moment later, he texted:
"Will smith walked on stage and punched Chris rock in the face!!!! Legit."
He tagged a Youtube via Japanese TV ('the Uncensored exchange between Will Smith and Chris Rock') and I watched it. I showed it to my friends. I hopped into the house and showed it to my wife. I mean, this was unprecedented as far as I knew for the Oscars. Live television over, what, the past sixty years for the Academy, has garnered a handful of completely unexpected moments but two multimillionaires getting into a slap fight broadcast all over the world? This was like the JFK assassination if it had been stupid and pointless. It was like the Jerry Springer Show but with high-level celebrities.
What I saw was a smaller guy onstage getting bitch-slapped by a much larger guy because the smaller guy made fun of his wife. I’ve seen this nonsense before. Hell, I've been both the bully and the class clown.
Sherri was a fat girl that lived down the road from us. She and I didn't like each other—our families didn't really get along but we had to ride the bus together and wait for it on the end of a long country road every single weekday morning. I threw rocks at her on most mornings.
I don't know why. It was the thing she and I did every morning. She would insult me in some way, I would call her fat, she would call me stupid and I'd start flinging rocks at her. I never started the melee but I always ended it by throwing palm-sized stones. We were in eighth grade. We were stupid.
My mother (whom I had watched be brutalized by my first stepfather but had seemingly not connected that to my own behavior) let me know that that behavior was not acceptable. To be fair, my tiny spitfire mom didn't tell me this quite so politely—I pretty much had my ass handed to me for taunting a fat girl (mom was a heavy girl growing up) and throwing rocks at her at the bus stop.
As any thirteen year old boy would, I felt maligned and angry...at Sherri. SHE had gotten me in trouble. It was HER fault! She called me stupid and she laughed at my clothes! It was her fault that my mother had read me the riot act and I got grounded for doing NOTHING WRONG!!!
One day, I restrained myself from taking my unfocused masculine rage out on our neighbor. I came home, proud of myself. I told my mother that I hadn't thrown any rocks at Sherri that morning. All I got was a nod. "Can I be ungrounded?"
I'll never forget what she said in response to that.
"Donald. You don't get rewarded for NOT doing something you know is wrong. Your reward is that you are a better human being because you didn't bully that girl. Your reward is that you weren't an awful person...this morning. Make NOT doing the wrong thing a habit and you just might not be killed by your mother before you graduate eighth grade. Your reward is being allowed to live."
I certainly wasn't rewarded with an Oscar statue.
“Art imitates life,” Will Smith said in his acceptance speech after winning the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance in King Richard, a movie in which Smith plays a manipulative and motivated (but notably nonviolent) Svengali to his tennis playing daughters.
“This is a beautiful moment,” he said. Earlier he said “Keep my wife’s name out your fucking mouth,” twice after slapping a smaller man for doing what he was paid to do—make jokes at the expense of the high-powered celebrities in the room for an audience who wants to see these moguls taken down a peg and respond with grace.
I did make it past eighth grade graduation and Sherri and I became friends.
As a Freshman, I was known to be a real smart ass and would routinely crack my friends up in the cafeteria aping teachers and a few of the more meathead seniors. A guaranteed laugh and, given the seniors mostly ate lunch off-campus, I was relatively safe.
Safe until one day after school when Brett Lockett found me.
He was technically my step-brother but I'd only known him for a year since my mom married his father. He was one of the seniors I poked fun at the most and he looked pissed.
I ran. I mean, what else was I gonna do? The guy was a foot taller than me and played football for the high school. He pursued, tackled me, and beat the living hell out of me.
I went back inside to clean myself up and one of the teachers saw me.
"What happened to you, Hall?"
"Brett beat the crap out of me because I was making fun of the fact that he's flunking Senior English at lunch."
"Maybe you shouldn't make fun of him, then."
I've read a lot of shit talking about this moment that will now and forever be known as "The Slap."
People taking the time to mention that Rock wasn't funny. That he shouldn't have made fun of Jada's (admittedly a pretty funny and certainly not life-threatening) disease. That Smith was the victim. That neither man was as good as people seem to think.
Black women on Twitter applauding Smith for defending his wife. White women wondering why Smith wasn't charged with assault.
For me, none of that matters much.
Smith was the typical bully. Rock was the typical class clown. If Rock had been The Rock, Will Smith would've just continued to laugh and let Jada sulk because bullies only pick on the littler guys.
In his acceptance speech, he apologized to the Academy and the nominees. If he'd offered instead an apology to Chris Rock, I'd have been impressed. He definitely deserved that Oscar because his performance in King Richard was stellar. He did not, however, deserve the standing ovation but the cheerleaders always throw the winning quarterback on their shoulders in praise despite the fact that he publicly popped the goofy guy telling jokes.