Celebrities unhinged.
On March 27, 2022, during a live television broadcast of the 94th Academy Awards, popular actor Will Smith hijacked the ceremony by storming onstage to slap comedian Chris Rock for a tame joke about Smith’s actress wife, Jada Pinkett. Then Smith returned to his seat and, in an epic explosion of Hollywood narcissism, spewed profane threats at Rock, which were broadcast around the world, sucking all the air out of an event designed to showcase the achievements of his fellow artists. Some speculated that Smith’s meltdown stemmed not from a chivalrous defense of his wife’s honor, but from the pent-up humiliation of being wedded to a woman who publicly insisted on having an “open marriage.”[1]
Instead of being ejected from the event and arrested for the assault, Smith was given the Best Actor Oscar moments later and received a standing ovation from the celebrity colleagues whose showcase he had just hijacked and trashed. As composer Oscar Levant once quipped in regard to Hollywood’s moral spinelessness: “Beneath the Tinsel of Tinseltown is … tinsel.”
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