In their rush to be seen to be doing something about Will Smith, the Oscars board of governors ended up doing nothing more than leaving themselves open to accusations of double standards.
They couldn’t take away Will Smith’s Best Actor Oscar for slapping Chris Rock when sexual predators Harvey Weinstein and Roman Polanski still have theirs.
They couldn’t expel Men In Black star Smith because he’d moved far more quickly to take control of the story and resign from the Academy.
So they banned him from all their events, including the Oscars, for 10 years.
Fair enough. We are all agreed that you can’t go around slapping people, even though this column remains of the opinion that we are in a weird place with so-called comedians at awards nights: Dead set against violence but prepared to normalise the kind of bullying and humiliation of individuals at these types of events that would probably earn you a trip to HR in the workplace.
Again, shame on Rock who made Smith’s wife Jada the butt of his jokes because of her shaven head. It is well known she suffers from alopecia. Would she have been fair game if she’d had breast cancer?
Reading Smith’s autobiography on holiday last week (I had a lovely time, thank you), I was also struck by this in the second chapter.
“When I was nine years old, I watched my father punch my mother in the side of her head so hard that she collapsed. I saw her spit blood. That moment in that bedroom, probably more than any other in my life, has defined who I am today.
“Within everything that I have done since then – the awards, the accolades, the spotlights and the attention, the characters and the laughs – there has been a subtle string of apologies to my mother for my inaction that day.
“For failing her in that moment. For failing to stand up to my father. For being a coward.”
None of that excuses his actions two weeks ago. But it does explain why he snapped on that night.
His book also details a string of examples he would come to recognise as double standards in his negative treatment over the years.
A furious debate is understood to have raged within the Academy’s 9,000 members in Whats App groups in the fortnight after Smith’s slap.
It would be fascinating to see a Venn diagram of which members were dead set on Smith’s suspension and which ones signed a 2009 petition calling for Polanski – who admitted raping a child four decades ago – to be released from detention in Zurich.
It took 40 years for the Academy to take a stand over Polanski, only expelling him in 2018. Before then he’d won a Best Director Oscar in 2003 to a standing ovation.
No statement from the Academy back then blasting his “unacceptable” and “harmful” conduct, as there was last week over Smith.
Allegations over the conduct of a string of other big names, including Kevin Spacey, Woody Allen and Mel Gibson have not seen any of them exiled over the last few decades either, even temporarily.
But consistency doesn’t appear to be paramount in the minds of the Academy or its members – only appeasing the social media mob.
