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Watch the uncensored moment Will Smith smacks Chris Rock on stage at the Oscars, drops F-bomb

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Will smith hit chris rock | Best Documentary Feature : Summer of Soul | 94th Academy Awards

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Behind The Scenes of Cuba Gooding Jr's 1996 Oscar Speech

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In case you're just now waking up, last night's Oscars was pretty gosh darn memorable.

Not for any of the winners, you understand - those were all pretty much as predicted and as scripted. 'CODA' won Best Picture, Jane Campion won Best Director, all these important moments will likely go under-reported and unnoticed by everyone. You needn't worry about there being another 'Moonlight' moment. No, the big dramatic moment of the night came when Will Smith walked up on stage and slapped Chris Rock square in the face after he made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith's hair.

You can read our full analysis of that whole thing, including an unedited video of the incident gleaned from Japanese television, right over here. Right now, however, we're going to pull together some of the reactions from Twitter and friends, let us begin by saying that the takes were scalding and the jokes were plentiful.

Let's dive in.

Taika Waititi's face, Jason Bateman smiling, Ron Howard in the background hunched over the phone with Sarah Paulson (?). This has the setup of a Caravaggio painting, but the reality is... yeah. This is an image.

Elsewhere, it seems the reaction was decidedly mixed because, let's face it, it's chaotic.

Meanwhile, it seems that Cher had a good night?

Lupita Nyong'o and Nicole Kidman, however, captured the general vibe of the room post-slap. Madness.

As one would expect, the image of the incident itself has now passed into living memory for all.

Needless to say, this has made the Oscars completely relevant for another few years. Well done, Will Smith and Chris Rock, you've just saddled us with coverage of this clown show for another decade at the very least.

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And now, Twitter's reaction to Will Smith's slap at the Oscars

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Not for any of the winners, you understand - those were all pretty much as predicted and as scripted. 'CODA' won Best Picture, Jane Campion won Best Director, all these important moments will likely go under-reported and unnoticed by everyone. You needn't worry about there being another 'Moonlight' moment.

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A person can see himself, as Will Smith does, as a "protector" of other people and still be profoundly self-absorbed.

Sunday night, Smith gave a six-minute acceptance speech as he received the Academy Award for best actor in King Richard. Most of it was an attempt to explain, apologize for, and to some degree excuse, his own violence.

"Richard Williams was a fierce defender of his family," Smith said during his acceptance speech, invoking the tennis patriarch he won the Oscar for portraying. "Making this film, I got to protect Aunjanue Ellis, who is one of the most strongest, most delicate people I've ever met. [She played Richard's wife, Oracene Price.] I got to protect Saniyya [Sidney] and Demi [Singleton], the two actresses that played Venus and Serena.

"I'm being called on in my life to love people and to protect people and to be a river to my people. I know to do what we do, you got to be able to take abuse, you got to be able to have people talk crazy about you. In this business, you got to be able to have people disrespecting you, and you got to smile and pretend like that's OK."

Will Smith accepts the award for best actor in a leading role for King Richard on March 27.
Robyn Beck/AFP/via Getty Images

Earlier in the evening, right before Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson accepted the Oscar for his feature documentary Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), Smith ascended to the stage of the Dolby Theatre to "protect" his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, by slapping presenter Chris Rock, live, on television.

Then he stomped back to his seat near the stage. "Keep my wife's name out your f-ing mouth," he thundered. Rock had made an ill-advised joke about Pinkett Smith, who lives with alopecia, saying he was looking forward to G.I. Jane 2. Smith responded with his five fingers making their way to Rock's face.

To some, this was a display of chivalry, and Smith was to be commended. But it took me back to the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards when rapper Kanye West also tried to portray his actions as a form of gallantry in defending a wronged woman.

"Yo, Taylor, I'm really happy for you, I'll let you finish, but Beyoncé has one of the best videos of all time," West said as justification for rushing the stage in the middle of a live broadcast after Taylor Swift, and not Beyoncé, won the award for best female video. "One of the best videos of all time!"

It took years, a presidential pronouncement of jackassery and an oral history of the evening to come to a public consensus about the boneheadedness of West's actions and how shabby they were. West, in a spontaneous act of inebriated umbrage, was not only unfair to Swift, but also to Beyoncé, who then became responsible for cleaning up the mess that he made.

Which brings us to Sunday night and to Smith making a mess of what was supposed to be his own crowning moment. It's tempting to speculate that it's because he's never forgiven himself for witnessing his father abuse his mother as a child and not being able to defend her. It's uncomfortable and ethically dubious to drop too far down the pop psychology rabbit hole when evaluating these sorts of happenings.

But we do know a couple of things for sure, and one is that Pinkett Smith has bristled previously at a grand public gesture made by her husband, supposedly in her honor. Here's a scene from Wesley Lowery's 2021 of Smith:

As Smith's stardom grew, his wife would wake up many mornings in tears. At one point, she turned down an opportunity for her band to open for Guns N' Roses so that Smith could continue shooting The Pursuit of Happyness. Things reached a breaking point by Jada's 40th birthday, in 2011. Will had spent three years planning a private family-and-friends dinner in Santa Fe, where he screened a documentary he'd commissioned that chronicled her life and traced her family's lineage back to slavery (and in which he tracked down a descendant of the white family who once owned Jada's ancestors).
When they got back to the hotel suite that night, Jada was nearly silent. "That was the most disgusting display of ego I have ever seen in my life," Smith recalls his wife telling him.
Smith's public persona, crafted over decades, has been one built on embracing the role of hero, protector and good cop. Cops, after all, are people we entrust to be violent. We give them billy clubs and guns and stun guns and we tell them to exercise judgment in a country that is steeped in violence.

Cops like to invoke a cliché about their jobs: They see themselves as sheepdogs, protecting unarmed civilians from wolves who would make a meal of them. This is how "good violence" is differentiated from "bad violence."

"Art imitates life," Smith said Sunday night. "I look like the crazy father, just like they said. I look like the crazy father, just like they said about Richard Williams. But love will make you do crazy things."

"Love makes you do crazy things" is a phrase that makes the hair stand up on the necks of survivors of harassment and abuse. That's because it's often invoked as an explanation for violence that, no matter how well-intentioned, leaves lasting wounds. It is a massive red flag. Violence committed in the name of defending a woman's honor is rooted in sexism. It's ugly. It's coarse, and it does nothing to serve the people in whose name it is committed. Instead of slapping Rock, Smith could have held his umbrage for his acceptance speech. Perhaps it only would have given him more time to fume, but it might have allowed him time to be more reflective, more eloquent and more celebratory of his own wife and family.

Instead, what followed was a display in which Smith positioned himself as a victim, despite the fact that he was a best actor winner and one of the most powerful and adored men in Hollywood. In times like these, it becomes essential to remember the words of writer bell hooks: "When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive," hooks wrote in her 2000 book All About Love: New Visions. "Love and abuse cannot coexist."

At the same time, we arrived at this point because Rock, like Dave Chappelle, has largely been able to skate through public life despite decades of public misogyny directed at Black women, including his own ex-wife, Malaak Compton-Rock. These transgressions often got waved away, the trade-off being that both men could be clever and angry about racism in ways we found appealing and profound, and that was enough to give their sexism a pass.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) is not innocent in all of this. Early Monday morning, it issued a statement via Twitter that "The Academy does not condone violence of any form." It made me think of a similar statement issued by the Recording Academy regarding West and the upcoming Grammy Awards telecast. The Recording Academy banned West from performing at this year's Grammy Awards ceremony, citing his "concerning online behavior," including a spate of online posts in which he has threatened his ex-wife's boyfriend with violence.

The hypocrisy of these institutions is impossible to ignore. It is glaringly clear that there is violence they treat as acceptable - and that is violence committed out of public view, the kind that gets passed along through whisper networks but is rarely publicly acknowledged or confronted. The violence of producers like Harvey Weinstein and Scott Rudin, of stars like Sean Penn, of directors like Roman Polanski. Because it happens off-camera, AMPAS voters can claim that the truth dwells in the murk of he-said, she-said. This is just as contemptible as Smith's and West's on-camera antics, perhaps even more contemptible, because it is indicative of a corruptive rot that has been protecting powerful men and the violence they inflicted, especially upon women, for decades.

Even as Smith won Sunday night, there were at least two people who lost: Thompson, and Pinkett Smith, both of whom were upstaged by one of the country's most well-liked on-screen "protectors."

Soraya Nadia McDonald is the senior culture critic for Andscape. She writes about pop culture, fashion, the arts and literature. She is the 2020 winner of the George Jean Nathan prize for dramatic criticism, a 2020 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism and the runner-up for the 2019 Vernon Jarrett Medal for outstanding reporting on Black life.

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Will Smith's slap at the Oscars wasn't protecting anyone, certainly not his wife

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A person can see himself, as Will Smith does, as a "protector" of other people and still be profoundly self-absorbed. Sunday night, Smith gave a six-minute acceptance speech as he received the Academy Award for best actor in King Richard. Most of it was an attempt to explain, apologize for, and to some degree excuse, his own violence.

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Will Smiths Oscar-Ohrfeige hallt nach und Kritik an seinem Verhalten ist berechtigt. Die Reaktionen stehen aber in keinem Verhältnis zur Tat selbst.

Wenn Sie glaubten, die Ohrfeigengeschichte um Will Smith und Chris Rock würde ein schnelles Ende finden, dann muss ich Sie enttäuschen - sie ist immer noch Thema. Wir erinnern uns: Bei der Oscarverleihung am 27. März ohrfeigte Smith Moderator Rock auf der Bühne, nachdem dieser einen Witz über Smiths Frau Jada Pinkett Smith und deren Haarausfall gemacht hatte.

Was dem Vorfall folgte, war ein medialer Sturm, der bis heute nicht abklingt. Alle Welt fühlte sich bemüßigt, ihre Meinung kundzutun, von Boris Johnson bis Joyce Carol Oates. Regisseur Judd Apatow setzte dem die Krone auf mit einem (inzwischen gelöschten) Tweet, in dem er sagte, Smith hätte Rock „umbringen" können.

Aktuell wird diskutiert, ob AppleTV+ den Film „Emancipation" mit Smith in der Hauptrolle, der eigentlich als Oscarkandidat gilt, ins Kino bringen soll - oder ob Smith so sehr zur Persona non grata geworden ist, dass dies PR-technisch keine gute Strategie wäre.

Kritik an Smiths Verhalten ist berechtigt, seine Zurschaustellung von toxischer Männlichkeit ist zu beanstanden. Die Reaktionen stehen aber in keinem Verhältnis zur Tat selbst. Vielen weißen Kommentator*innen ist entgangen, dass Alopezie (Haarverlust) gerade Schwarze Frauen betrifft. Rock aber wusste das, immerhin ist er Erzähler und Co-Produzent der Doku „Good Hair" (2009), die ebendieses Thema behandelt.

Hier geht es um mehr

Entsprechend war es vor allem „Black Twitter", wo man Verständnis für Smiths Kurzschlussreaktion zeigte. Dass er jetzt für zehn Jahre keine Oscarverleihung besuchen darf, ist ein noch schlechterer Scherz als der von Rock. Es zeigt die Doppelmoral der Academy, die in der Vergangenheit durchaus kontroversere Momente erlebt hat - ohne direkte Konsequenzen zu ziehen.

Beispielsweise als Roman Polanski, der wegen eines Vergewaltigungsverfahrens nicht in die USA einreisen durfte, 2002 als bester Regisseur ausgezeichnet wurde.

Oder als John Wayne 1973 während der Rede der Native American Sacheen Littlefeather festgehalten werden musste, um nicht die Bühne zu stürmen. Littlefeather wies damals im Namen von Marlon Brando die Auszeichnung für „Der Pate" zurück, was dieser durch sie mit dem Umgang Hollywoods mit Native Americans begründete. Die Academy entschuldigte sich erst in diesem Sommer im Zuge der Smith-Rock-Kontroverse bei der nun verstorbenen Littlefeather (2. Oktober).

Hollywood zeigt sich von seiner heuchlerischsten Seite. Die Diskussion rund um die Veröffentlichung von „Emancipation" ist nur ein weiteres unglaubliches Echo auf Smiths Ohrfeige. Für den Film wäre es wohl das Beste, wenn seine Veröffentlichung ausgesetzt würde.

Aber hier geht es um mehr: Denn man kann den Faktor Rassismus kaum außen vorlassen, schaut man sich an, warum ausgerechnet Smith als Schwarzer Mann im immer noch sehr weißen Hollywood so über die Maße verurteilt wird.

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Will Smith und seine Oscar-Ohrfeige: Hollywoods heuchlerische Seite

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Will Smiths Oscar-Ohrfeige hallt nach und Kritik an seinem Verhalten ist berechtigt. Die Reaktionen stehen aber in keinem Verhältnis zur Tat selbst. Wenn Sie glaubten, die Ohrfeigengeschichte um Will Smith und Chris Rock würde ein schnelles Ende finden, dann muss ich Sie enttäuschen - sie ist immer noch Thema.

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The fastest slaps require the strongest Wills. Unleash your inner Slap Smith and see how fast you can slap Chris Rock.

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Will Smith's Slap at Oscar's was Staged with Proof (Slow Video Analysis)

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Did Chris Rock Deserve To Be Slapped By Will Smith At The 2022 Academy Awards? | SDP

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Everybody has an opinion on Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars, but do they need to share it?

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Marlon Brando's Best Actor Oscar win for "The Godfather" | Sacheen Littlefeather

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The Godfather Wins Best Picture: 45th Oscars (1973)

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Will Smith wins the Academy Award for Best Actor in King Richard