Chris Rock vs. Will Smith: Who Won the Oscars?

By Kyle Smith

Monday, March 28, 2022

 

Hey, I said they should hire Chris Rock to host again. Am I ever wrong? The guy was on stage for 30 seconds and he single-handedly turned a weird, dull Oscar ceremony into one for the ages. The GIF shall be immortal.

 

Rock made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s buzz cut: “Jada, I love you, G.I. Jane 2, can’t wait to see it!” Except Mrs. Smith has a medical condition that causes hair loss. Did Rock know this? I didn’t. Will Smith laughed at the joke initially, then looked over at his unhappy wife and reversed gears. Hard. Suddenly Mr. Nice Guy wasn’t so nice. One of the biggest movie stars alive marched right up on stage and slapped Chris Rock on the left jaw, though to his discredit Smith neglected to say, “Welcome to Earth.”

 

Wouldn’t you know it? They hire three women to host, and the boys steal the show by having a fight.

 

“Oho, wow! Will Smith just smacked the sh** out of me! That was the . . . greatest night in the history of television,” Rock said, not overstating facts. The guy must have worked a lot of rowdy rooms in Laff Lounges and Ha-Ha Halls on the way up, but I’m guessing he never got slapped in the face by a movie star before. Ladies and gentlemen, Chris Rock! Not only should he host the Oscars every year, he should be the next secretary of state. Talk about grace under pressure. When was the last time you got slapped in the face by a large man? I annoy people for a living, and it hasn’t happened to me lately. If it had been you or me up there, we would at least have been caught off guard to get smacked while presenting an Oscar. Rock just moved on. He took it as though he’d rehearsed it for a month.

 

Oh yeah, and the Oscar was won by the biggest corporation on earth. Hurrah for the little guy! Apple TV+ sneakily won Best Picture as the suits from its archrival Netflix looked around for marketing people to treat the way Smith treated Rock. Netflix has been trying to win itself the top Oscar for about ten years, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on this project, and it’s still got zilch. Instead, Apple TV+, which launched just two years ago, won with CODA, a feel-good dramedy about a lovable family of deaf people and their lovely daughter. It was the first movie debuting on a streaming service and the first movie premiering at the Sundance Film Festival ever to win Best Picture. It also won Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor, for the previously unknown Troy Kotsur, who, as a deaf man taking home an Oscar for acting, notched another first. Meanwhile, Netflix sweatily pursued the Oscars with its can’t-miss message-movie-of-the-week The Power of the Dog, “a dazzling evisceration of one of the country’s foundational myths,” according to the New York Times (i.e., it’s about a closeted homosexual cowboy). It proved one of the biggest disappointments in Academy history. Riding in with twelve nominations, it won only a single award — Best Director for Jane Campion, who could hardly lose after everyone pointed out that only two women had ever won in the category before.

 

As great as Rock was, Smith was pretty good too. Minutes after hitting Rock, he won his first Oscar, as the dad of the tennis phenoms the Williams sisters in King Richard. He must have rewritten most of his speech in his head in the final hour, because now it was all about how sometimes a man just has to slap a comic for insulting his lady: “Richard Williams was a fierce defender of his family,” he said. (Williams isn’t dead, but whatever.) Smith spoke of how he “got to protect” the actresses in the film and said, “I’m being called on in my life to love people and to protect people and to be a river to my people.” He cried freely, making a swipe at Rock in the course of taking responsibility: Smith said that by now he should have learned to “take abuse” and “have people disrespecting you” and added, “You got to smile and pretend like that’s okay.” (I can hear Rock responding, “It was a joke, man! Are you a grownup or not?”) Smith did get around to apologizing, but not to Rock: “I want to apologize to the Academy. I want to apologize to all my fellow nominees. . . . Thank you, and I hope the Academy invites me back.”

 

Even before the Smith-Rock fracas, it was one mighty weird ceremony. Three athletes you probably wouldn’t recognize if you saw them at McDonald’s doing . . . a tribute to James Bond? A hip-hop tribute to . . . The Godfather? A big production number built around . . . a song that wasn’t nominated for an Oscar? Jokes from . . . Amy Schumer? After last year’s Castor Oil Oscars, the mood was at least lighter this time around. Only a couple of references to Ukraine, including one from Ukrainian-descended Mila Kunis, followed by a moment of silence for that country.

 

I give credit to co-hosts Schumer, Regina Hall, and Wanda Sykes for at least trying to be funny. But they had no rapport together, just as they have no record of working together. Why were they actually on stage together? I have no idea. Especially when Rock and Tiffany Haddish, two extremely funny people, were actually on the premises.

 

Fittingly enough for the night, the hosts made cracks about how terrible some of the nominees were: Sykes said, of the plodding The Power of the Dog, “I’ve watched that movie three times and I’m halfway through it.” Fair. “This year we saw a frightening display of how toxic masculinity turned into cruelty against women and children,” Hall said. “Damn that Mitch McConnell!” added Sykes, in a joke that sounded like it was written by an intern, or maybe by automated joke software. Later Sykes presented a “Texas voter registration” card that “comes pre-shredded.”

 

Schumer, who had promised before the show that she was going to pull a Ricky Gervais, proved willing to tweak the crowd. Some of her jokes look pretty good on paper. Referring to Aaron Sorkin’s terrible I Love Lucy movie Being the Ricardos, she said, “I mean, the innovation to make a movie about Lucille Ball without even a moment of funny . . . It’s like making a biopic about Michael Jordan and just showing the bus trips between games.” Alas, Schumer is one of those comics whose manner is so self-satisfied she almost makes it impossible for you to laugh. “This year the Academy hired three women to host because it’s cheaper than hiring one man,” she said at the top of the show, offering exactly the sort of alternate-reality cliché you’d expect from a woman with a pay-to-talent ratio approaching infinity. (Schumer lives in a $12 million apartment, indicating she is the first comic in history to earn a million bucks for every person on earth who thinks she’s funny.)

 

The one joke that landed during the opening monologue was when Hall said, “You know, we’ve been dealing with Covid for two years. It’s been really hard on people.” “Just look at Timothée Chalamet,” continued Schumer, and the camera cut to J. K. Simmons instead. But the joke would have worked better if the audience actually knew who Timothée Chalamet was. Chalamet was wearing a sparkly tuxedo jacket over a bare chest, the sight of which suggested that he either (a) is on an unannounced hunger strike, (b) has never seen the inside of a gym, or (c) is actually a seventh grader. The “edgy” joke came from Sykes: “We’re going to have a great night tonight, and for you people in Florida, we’re going to have a gay night. Gay gay gay gay gay gay.” Brave. Brave brave brave brave brave. Sykes got a laugh returning from a break dressed as Richard Williams from King Richard, then the bit wobbled when Hall appeared as Tammy Faye Bakker, then it died completely when Schumer descended clumsily from the rafters as Spider-Man.

 

Overall, the ceremony suffered from the same problems as ever: Despite streamlining things by moving the awarding of eight technical Oscars to a pre-show ceremony, the broadcast still managed to be one of the longest in history, at nearly four hours. Star power was lacking, which is why we had to suffer though watching John Leguizamo saying the model for the Oscar statuette was Latino, so, “If you win you’re gonna have 13½ inches of Mexican in your hands.” Ew. A big splashy number gave us “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” even though that song was not nominated. (Disney inexplicably pushed “Dos Oruguitas” from Encanto instead; it lost to the Billie Eilish James Bond song.)

 

Beyoncé is a big star, though, and she opened the show with the first-ever live performance of the Oscar-nominated song, “Be Alive,” from King Richard. Which reminded us all that it’s a terrible song that could not be saved by armies of dancers wearing tennis-ball-yellow outfits and performing on the courts where Venus and Serena Williams learned to volley.

 

The sweet moments came from relative newcomers such as Ariana DeBose, who won Best Supporting Actress for West Side Story (“Oh my word, you know what, what is this?”) and Best Supporting Actor Kotsur, the deaf actor who said in sign language that when he visited the White House, “I was planning on teaching them some dirty sign language but Marlee Matlin told me to behave myself.” Kotsur said his dad was the best signer in his family, but after a car accident he was paralyzed from the neck down and rendered cruelly unable to use his hands. The presentation of the final award was either touching or unbearable: To honor the 50th anniversary of Cabaret, Liza Minnelli came out for a surprise appearance, but she was wheelchair-bound and looked extremely frail. On a night of surprises, this was a most unwelcome one.