The Slap Heard Round the World

By Ross Douthat

Friday, March 31, 2022

 

I thought I’d said my piece about this year’s Academy Awards in advance, both in this space and at greater length in my day job: how the year’s nominees were worthy enough, but how few of them were actually seen by anyone in theaters, emphasizing our Covid-accelerated transition to a world of movies as just one form of interchangeable content, not The Movies as they were. The Oscar telecast itself? Irrelevant, predictable, just a footnote to the dialectic.

 

Little did I know. The slap that Will Smith delivered to Chris Rock, just a few short minutes before Smith himself received a Best Actor statuette for his work as an overprotective father in King Richard, was perhaps not quite a world-historical event, but at the very least it eclipsed, in the annals of unscripted Oscar theatrics, Sacheen Littlefeather’s stepping in for Marlon Brando, Jack Palance’s push-ups, and even the Best Picture mix-up between La La Land and Moonlight. (If you watched it and still believe that it was staged, I would suggest that you have rather overrated the dramatic chops of Rock and Smith alike.)

 

From the point of view of what the Academy Awards are supposed to rep­resent, the celebration of Hollywood as a source of dreams and stars, it felt like a morbid symptom, a flailing on the deathbed, a grim parody of the Oscar past. Did you miss seeing big stars in the front row of the old Kodak, now Dolby, Theatre, the famous faces lined up for a night of gentle ribbing or Billy Crystal song-and-dance? Well, here they all were, all dressed up and utterly discombobulated by what they were seeing, like wax statues at Madame Tussauds watching one of their number come to life and run amok.

 

While Twitter murmured about what was happening offstage, about Denzel Washington (one of the last actors to master stardom rather than be mastered by it) somehow intervening with Smith, the stage after the slap gave us a shambolic spectacle, with superannuated char­acters emerging to remind us of what stardom used to be: now Pacino and De Niro in a Godfather tribute, now Anthony Hopkins giving out Best Actress, and then the Pulp Fiction trio of Uma Thurman (looking great), John Travolta (no comment), and Samuel L. Jackson, who together handed Smith his Best Actor and stepped back to watch his tearful, half-apologetic, fully self-aggrandizing acceptance speech.

 

It was riveting television, but what it advertised was Hollywood stardom as a mixture of wax-museum nostalgia and can’t-look-away toxicity — a combination increasingly unmoored, for all that Smith tried to link his acting out to the aggressive tennis dad he played, from the movies the stars are supposed to elevate and sell.

 

The unmooring was made even clearer by the sequel to the slap, the over­shadowed climax of the show, when the Best Picture of 2021 was awarded to a movie appropriately called “CODA.” On an aesthetic level this was not one of the Academy’s worst Best Picture decisions, because unlike Crash or American Beauty or, for that matter, The Shape of Water nobody will hate CODA ten or 20 years from now. It’s a sweet-natured little movie about the hearing daughter of a deaf fishing family in Gloucester, Mass., who is torn between her budding career as a singer and her obligations to her family, and I defy anyone to say anything particularly negative about it. (The Best Supporting Actor that went to the deaf actor Troy Kotsur, one of its stars, produced the night’s most genuinely lovely acceptance speech.)

 

But as a Best Picture winner for this specific year, for a movie industry with an identity crisis and struggling through the Covid era, CODA was a perfectly in­sane choice. And not just because it’s a small-scale and sentimental and starless and not particularly memorable film, the opposite of an advertisement for the movies as larger-than-life entertainment. No, because in a year when almost nobody saw the Oscar nominees in theaters, CODA was the ne plus ultra of that problem: It played exclusively on Apple TV+, one of the least-subscribed players in the streaming market, a poor cousin for now to Netflix or Amazon, small screen and small audience at once.

 

It was a Best Picture choice, in other words, that took the conventional wisdom that the Oscars are turning into the equivalent of the Independent Spirit Awards, a niche production for niche audiences with a few big stars in the mix, and literalized it to an absurd degree.

 

What were the voters thinking? What was Will Smith thinking? In the dialectic of history, maybe those answers don’t matter: The movies as we know them are ending, and it’s that invisible force that fills the ballots for a glorified TV movie, that lifts Smith from his seat, that gives us the slap heard round the world.