It happened when Chris Rock came up to present the documentary award. Before announcing the nominations, he did, as usual, a short stand-up monologue aimed at the married couples between the candidates. He started with Javier Bardem who is afraid of what will happen if he wins tonight and his wife, Penelope Cruz, loses. Then he moved on to Will Smith and his partner, Jade Pinkett. At the sight of Pinkett’s cropped haircut, he said, “Jida, I’m already waiting to see you in JA Jane 2” – as a hint of the cropped hair adorning Demi Moore’s head in the original movie. Then Will Smith took the stage and slapped Rock. Watching a live broadcast seems like a joke to me. And another well-planned and well-staged joke. But it was only as the camera continued to follow Smith that he returned to his seat with teary eyes and an angry face as he shouted at Rock “You’ll never get my wife’s name out of your fucking mouth,” did the outburst turn out to be real.
The reason for the outbreak – but not the justification for it – is that Pinkett’s cropped haircut is due to a medical problem that caused her to lose hair. Rock’s joke, it turns out, was pointless. Smith’s reaction was terrible. And it’s not over: stunned rock, still smiling, he said to the camera: Will Smith just slapped me. And there was a fraction of a second where you see Rock computing in his head what to do next, and he, like a champion, just went on with his text. From that moment on, this is what dominated the rest of the ceremony. When Sean Combs (Pap Daddy) later came up to perform one of the nominated songs, he asked Smith and Rock to reconcile their differences “as in the family, in love.” And Amy Schumer, one of the three presenters, turned the case into a sequence of jokes.
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Will Smith hits Chris Rock
( Photo: AFP)
But then Smith also won an Oscar as a lead actor for his role in “Winning Family,” a film he also produced, and apologized to academia, but not to rock, with problematic phrases like “love makes you do crazy things” (bad excuse) and “for a moment” I became the character I played in the movie “(oh, was Richard Williams violent too? Strange, it was not mentioned in the movie, so are you incriminating him now or slandering him?).
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Smith receives the Academy Award
(Photo: AP)
So it turned out that the big loser is: Will Smith. It is an event that has the potential to ruin his career, first and foremost among his black colleagues. The black film community is so searching for the recognition of Hollywood and the Oscars that such an incident of violence might cause it to immediately turn its back on Smith. On the other hand, we all know that the whole coming year has been hearing about it endlessly. Will Chris Rock sue Smith? Will he file a complaint against him? (Presumably the academy and ABC network will try to convince him, plus a lot of cash, to silence the whole story). And one can start betting that at next year’s Oscars Smith and Rock will jointly present the Best Actress award, joke about the event and hold a public reconciliation live. Because this is Hollywood, what happens spontaneously in one year, gets remake, imitation, exploitation and marketing the year after. Which is also why the Oscars will continue to be broadcast live in prime time. It was a disgusting low point for Will Smith, but ABC got its hit, which everyone talked about the night after and the next morning.
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Jane Campion. The third Oscar-winning director
(Photo: AP)
Still, despite the rare and extreme event, a few other things that are actually related to cinema happened at the ceremony. The big winner is: “Dune.” Although he did not win the Best Picture award, “Dune” – one of the only box office hits of the past year, and an excellent film in its own right – came out of the Oscars holding six figurines: for design, effects, editing, photography, sound and music. This, Hollywood declares, is the film that was best made this year.
But the film award finally went to “CODA,” an independent production, about a teenage girl who hears a daughter of deaf parents, who rake in all the big prizes at the Sundance Film Festival a little over a year ago, and was bought by Apple TV for an astronomical $ 25 million. And those who at Apple Studios have recognized the potential and gambled on it need to get promoted and raised. This is also an important lesson: when an early buzz starts around a movie, as it was two years ago with Land of the Nomads, it should not be ignored. And although it seems to us that “CODA” joined the Oscar race late, which was supposed to be under the complete control of “The Power of the Dog”, it now turns out that his campaign started a long time ago. And we also need to talk about cinema: “The Power of the Dog” is better directed, smart, important, intelligent. But “CODA” is a movie that is all emotion. Anyone who has seen them both, “CODA” will be the movie he would like to see right now again, “The Power of the Dog”? less.
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Presenters of the Oscar ceremony, right: Virginia Hall, Wanda Sykes and Amy Schumer.
( Photo: AFP)
And so “The Power of the Dog,” the leading contender at the start of the season with 12 historic nominations, and with a feminine and revisionist look at the stories of the Wild West, remains the loser, with only one win. An important and central win, though: the director’s award, which was given to Jane Campion. She had already won an Oscar for the screenplay she had written for her film The Piano, and that same year she was nominated for an Oscar and lost to Steven Spielberg, who won for “Saving Private Ryan.” This year Campion and Spielberg competed with each other again, and this time they won. A justified win.
It was a not very significant year for the history of cinema, a wounded year that was still affected by the Corona crisis and the absence of viewers from cinemas, the paucity of box office hits and a limited amount of films that became significant cultural events. The Oscar ceremony – which this year too was slated at the end of March and created a grueling awards season at length – tried to pretend everything was back to normal, staging a ceremony like never before at Dolby Hall in Hollywood with three offerings, stand-up clips, music and almost full chair occupancy.
In the end, this is the ceremony in which Hollywood has finally given in to streaming: “CODA” is available to watch on Apple TV, not in theaters. And Netflix, which launched “The Power of the Dog,” lost again. So, this is the year that it also turned out that Hollywood has never hated streaming, it just hates Netflix.