It was quite a coup for the Oscars to land a rare performance from Beyoncé, singing her nominated song from King Richard on the same Compton tennis courts where Venus and Serena Williams got their start. But the fact that the luminous production number, featuring dozens of musicians and dancers swathed in neon, tennis-ball chartreuse, opened the telecast meant you had to wonder: Could any act that followed Beyoncé possibly make the same impact?
Well, one did—just not in the way that anyone involved in the show’s production had planned. Long before the ceremony ended, it was clear the 94th Academy Awards would be remembered as the year Will Smith leaped onstage to slap Chris Rock for making a tasteless joke about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, then went on to win top acting honors for his role in, yes, King Richard, and accept the award with a speech in which he rambled disconcertingly about love and family. Entertainment media will surely spend the week ahead adjudicating how to divide the blame between Smith, Rock, and various vaguely defined societal forces, e.g. toxic masculinity. But since this is a review of the telecast as a whole, I’d be remiss not to acknowledge the extent to which the shock of Smith’s interruption was compounded by how snoozy and promotional Sunday’s Oscars felt during the two-hour interval between Beyoncé and the slap.
It wasn’t supposed to be so boring. I have trouble recalling the last year when the Oscars weren’t mired in controversy, from #OscarsSoWhite and #OscarsSoMale to the Kevin Hart saga that led to three host-free years and the spectacle of men who’ve been accused of sexual misconduct “supporting” Time’s Up. But the run-up to 2022 was contentious even by that standard. While responses to the first hosts since 2018—Regina Hall, Amy Schumer and Wanda Sykes—were muted,…
Source : time
