Today, Explained - “The greatest night in the history of television”

Episode Date: March 28, 2022

The Oscars were bordering on irrelevancy until Will Smith slapped Chris Rock on stage. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh and Will Reid, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Victoria Chamberlin, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

And the Oscar goes to... I've been watching the Academy Awards for as long as I can remember. And the Oscar goes to... It was a thing we did as a family when I was a kid. And the Oscar goes to... Then it was a thing I did with roommates in college. The Oscar goes to... Then, as an adult in my 20s, we'd throw Oscar parties.

But over the years, the Oscars have begun to feel less and less relevant. They get so much wrong. Not as funny as they used to be. Zero hosts. Three hosts. And so, as I made time to sit down for hours on Sunday after my friends made fun of me for watching the Oscars, I asked myself, why am I still doing this? And then something happened.

Greatest night in the history of television. Okay. And I said to myself, this is why I watch the Oscars. I'm Sean Ramos for AME, it's Today Explained. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. Oscars. The Oscars opened with Beyonce last night.

Queen B was performing her song Be Alive from the movie King Richard. She performed with a full band and orchestra on a tennis court to honor the film's subject matter. And it wasn't just any tennis court, it was the very court in Compton, California where Venus and Serena Williams used to do tennis drills with their father, Richard Williams. Beyonce was wearing tennis ball green, the entire orchestra and band was dressed to match. It was luscious, it was ornate, and it was unlike any other opening to the Oscars in the history of the show. I was sitting on top of the world again. Huh. And though King Richard was far from the most talked-about movie of the year,

certainly not the most acclaimed, Beyoncé's opening performance set the stage for Hollywood's biggest night. It seemed to say, you will remember King Richard. And by the end of the night, everyone would, but maybe not for the right reasons. Wow, dude. It was a G.I. Jane jump. As you may have heard, extremely famous actor Will Smith got up on stage and slapped extremely famous comedian Chris Rock across the face, making the 94th annual Academy Awards among the most memorable in nearly a century. On the show today, we're going to try and understand what exactly happened and how it may have somehow been a good thing for everyone involved.

I think to start, we have to go back to 2016. Next tonight, the new message to Hollywood, Spike Lee and Jada Pinkett Smith boycotting the Oscars. That was when there was a protest movement called Oscars So White going around to boycott the show because of the lack of diversity in the nominations. For the second year in a row, only white actors have been considered for the most coveted award in Hollywood. Snubbed for nominations this year, Idris Elba, Will Smith and Michael B. Jordan. Jada Pinkett was a big proponent of the protest, and Chris Rock hosted the show that year.

Jada's going to boycott the Oscars. Jada boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna's panties. I wasn't invited. Fast forward six years, and the Oscars have become a more diverse award show. Will Smith is nominated for Best Actor for the third time in his career and is the favorite to win. He walks the red carpet with his wife, Jada. They both look incredible. But if you've been following their lives, you know they've had some marital problems. I mean, because this is your red table and you brought yourself to the red table. I think

you need to say clearly what happened. That would, of course, seem like a private concern, but the Smiths have made it public on a Facebook show Jada hosts called Red Tabletop. And then I got into an entanglement with August. That's what I said. An entanglement? Yes. Yes.

A relationship. Yes. It was a relationship. Absolutely. Which probably makes it seem like fair game if you're hosting the 94th Academy Awards. So when I call your name, I'm just going to need you to come with me. Fair game for the host to riff on. Will Smith, you're married, but you know what?

You're on the list and it looks like Jada approved you, so you get on up here. Get on up here. The Smiths seem to take that one in stride. Will's doing a lot of action with his arms, being like, no, no, no, no, no, that's over. What certainly seemed like a few hours later, Chris Rock is on stage to present the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. But before he does that, he's got to rock some jokes. Wow, what a night. Everybody, no one's wearing a mask.

Just breathing raw dog tonight. He starts with COVID. Then he starts talking about couples. Javier Bardem and his wife are both nominated. Now, if she loses, he can't win. Then he pivots to the Smiths, and he zeroes in on Jada and her baldish head, which we should note looks pretty good on her. Jada, I love you. G.I. Jane 2, can't wait to see it. All right? Okay, I just want to pause here for a moment, because Will laughs at the joke comparing his wife's baldish head to Demi Moore's shaven head in the 1997 movie G.I. Jane. And that's important. Jada, however, does not. And that's maybe more important. Turns out

she's got alopecia, her bald head wasn't a choice, and Chris Rock should maybe know a thing or two about black women and their hair since he made a whole documentary about it in 2009. I digress. They cut back to Chris, and maybe we'll never know what happens in the intervening seconds. Maybe we'll find out in the coming days, weeks, or months. But what's clear is that Will Smith goes from finding the joke funny to seeing his wife not find the joke funny to finding the joke extremely unfunny.

I'm out here. Uh-oh. Richard. Oh, wow. Here's what happens next if you're watching in the United States. Will Smith. Now, it was of course censored because there's a lot of salty language which you're about to hear.

Here's what you heard if you were watching in Japan with translation. Wow. Will Smith just smacked the shit out of me. Will Smith did it. Keep my wife's name out your fucking mouth. Wow, dude. It was a G.I. Jane joke.

Keep my wife's name out your fucking mouth. I'm going to, okay? A lot of people watching last night had no idea if what they had just seen was a bit or a real reaction to a joke. I knew the second that Chris Rock tried to get back on track that it was indeed the genuine article. That was the greatest night in the history of television. Okay. Okay. Okay. Takes a few seconds to compose himself and somehow pulls it back together on live TV

to hand out the trophy for best documentary. Now, the beauty of documentaries, because they make you, when you watch one, you feel smart. Like you watch the... The show goes on after this explosive moment and hardly anyone even addresses it. Diddy comes out and says he's going to mediate.

Amy Schumer, one of the show's three hosts, comes out and asks if she'd missed anything. And then a few commercial breaks later... And the Oscar goes to... Will Smith himself wins the Oscar for Best Actor, a moment he's been chasing for roughly 30 years. Oh, man. And it's awkward as all hell. Richard Williams was a fierce defender of his family. At times, he tries to excuse his behavior.

He says something like he wants to be a vessel for love. I want to be a vessel for love. With tears in his eyes, he apologizes to the Academy, he apologizes to his fellow nominees, but he does not apologize to Chris Rock. Instead, he imparts some good advice he got from a friend.

Denzel said to me a few minutes ago, he said, at your highest moment, be careful. That's when the devil comes for you. Why one of the biggest movie stars in the world felt compelled to get up on live TV and smack one of the biggest comedians in the world, or at least a theory why, in a minute on Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family,

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Jane jump. Today explained Sean Ramos for him. The second people realized Will Smith really did slap Chris Rock, everyone had an opinion, including our guest. My name is Shamira Ibrahim. I am a culture writer and reporter from Brooklyn, New York. And Shamira, do you always watch the Oscars? How long have you been watching the Oscars? I actually regularly watch the Oscars. The funny thing is, I actually slept through last night's Oscars. I woke up in the middle of the night.

Like you meant to go to sleep or you accidentally fell asleep? I accidentally fell asleep because I had a long weekend and I woke up in the middle of the night to a bevy of text messages from friends and colleagues. What were they saying? Some version of, you saw that, right? Why do you think so many of your friends were reaching out to you specifically to ask you if you saw what just happened? Oh, one, because I text entirely too much. But I think the second reason is it was just a time for everyone to just get a collective kind of watering hole reaction, right? You know, we're all remote, right? So there's no equivalent really still of like coming to the workplace, you know, coming to the water cooler of like, you know, what the hell was that, right? How do you feel about that?

I can hardly count how many takes I saw last night from like, this is a huge moment for free speech. This is about cancel culture. I think I saw Judd Apatow saying that Will Smith could have killed Chris Rock with that slap. There was like, you know, defend black women. There was every version of take you wanted. You could have probably found on Twitter. And yet this morning, a friend sent me one of yours.

And you had something to say that I didn't see on Twitter last night or anywhere else this morning. What was your take? Well, first of all, I do need to say that if that slap is the most violent thing that you've ever seen in your life, you are living a very charmed life. And I would love to live your life. Indeed. But in general, that my take was really that I think the last couple of years of comedy, right? There, of course, been an escalating conversation of how a lot of marginalized communities have been feeling about how comedians have been engaging in their sets, right? The Oscars is a little bit different. Yes, we've had comedians and these like really, really trite comedy bits that have been ongoing from showmen of different sorts,

but it's still supposed to be a relative equal ground, right? Everyone's rich, everyone's successful. We're all kind of at a version of prom, right? It's like a homecoming party. Look at us, look at how we're celebrating. Some of us will get awards. Some of us will get superlatives. Some of us won't. But we'll all get drunk and go home at the end of the day, right? And we can do a little bit of ribbing. Yeah, we're all beautiful.

We're all wearing custom Dior, custom Gucci. Exactly. Custom Tom Ford, whatever it is. Right, right. How visual can you be with a swag bag that's worth more than my annual salary, right? You know, like, so it kind of is supposed to be this level playing field, right? But the Smiths are a little bit of a different case. You know, you have Will and Jada Pinkett, or Pinkett Smith, rather, who are the closest thing that I think Black America has to legitimate Black royalty, you know, outside of maybe like Jay and Beyonce, right? Where you have like a couple who can pretty much do like whatever they want on the level of, you know, white celebrity. Like if Will and Jada had a kid tomorrow and name them, I don't know, like E equals MC squared, like we might let them get

away with that. Some Grimes and Elon stuff. Exactly. You know, you know, they are fully leaned into autonomy of self with their children. You know, they let them homeschool their children. They lean into, you know, sometimes very erratic conversations about self-actualization and mathematical education interviews. And we just kind of let it rock. Failure is a massive part of being able to be successful. You have to get comfortable with failure. You have to actually seek failure.

Failure is where all of the lessons are. You know what? Whatever, you know, and that's fine. Will is a bona fide movie star right and i think that's like irrefutable at this point he has his own weekend yes he does he has literally crossed over from being a bona fide music star to tv star to movie stardom but that threshold has been really that prestige actor status he's tried it since ali? I could argue that he's been trying it since Six Degrees of Separation. I'm so sorry to bother you, but I've been hurt and I've lost everything.

I didn't know where to go. Your children, I'm a friend of your children. He mentioned our kids' names. Which I actually think is one of his best performances. 1993. Exactly, exactly, right? Then we continued and persisted, right? We had a concussion, which didn't really get him what he wanted. So he's constantly kind of been looking for his white whale, right? Which is that Oscar award. You know, it's so amazing to all of a sudden start hearing Oscar nominee before your name. You know, it's just, it's really, this period is the best period, even I'm sure more than winning or losing.

The fact the Oscar nominee is there, the anticipation, how people look at you. I mean, it's good. It's great. And this is part of what you tweeted about. And this might be hard for people to wrap their heads around. Even though Will and Jada are black royalty, they still felt like they and seeks validation. And it's why he constantly kind of pushed himself

as hard as possible, right? It's part of his own mentality, his own drive. He's spoken about it in the various Red Table talks he's appeared in. He's spoken about it in the various times he's talking about his books and his memoirs. I think that diversity is the American superpower. That's why we're great. And for me, at its best, Hollywood creates the imagery for that beauty. But for my part, I think that I have to fight for the ideals that make our country and make our Hollywood community great. So there's a level of pattern to his approach to actually seeking approval, seeking acceptance and showing that he can perform at the top tier of whatever he wants to do. OK, so you have these two competing phenomena here. You've got comedians have been punching down, though, at the Oscars.

It's kind of more level playing field. Exactly. You've got one of the most famous comedians in the world up there on stage. He's making jokes. People are laughing. Then you've got the Smiths, and they are really looking for validation this night.

Right. And how do these two forces clash? Wow. Will Smith just smacked the shit out of me. And I think that's a culmination of Will having a confluence of emotions, right? Of, oh, my status is being put in place here. I feel like I'm being affirmed as someone who can be spoken to in this way. And my family can be spoken about in this way.

And still having to kind of have these things poked at, I'm sure is just in some ways infuriating for him and his ego, right? In addition to infuriating that he has to kind of speak and defend his wife. And I think there's a lot of confluence of even for my class status, I'm still having to have this intra-class conversation when I think I should be above this and I should be able to kind of go off into the night and like ride into the sunset with my triumphant moment with my family. Which he ultimately sort of still gets on some level. There's some video of him circulating dancing at after parties. It seems like he still had his night.

Yeah, I think in some ways, I think he felt a little bit more badass for it, right? And I won't want to speak for him. But like, it kind of felt like his family was kind of doing like an even more triumphant stance, right? Is it that same Hollywood A-list superstar status, though, that allows Will Smith to get up in the middle of, you know, the biggest night in his industry and slap the person on stage and then just go sit back down like nothing happened? No, because I don't think he does that, let's say, if it's Neil Patrick Harris making that comment, right? I really don't think that happens, right? I think that becomes an even more dramatic circumstance. You think the world's weighing in so heavily because after two years of, you know, war, pandemic, crumbling democracy, insurrection, people just needed some silly celebrity nonsense to happen to just give them that water cooler moment they've been pining for for years? I think people are weighing in for different reasons.

People love mess. Absolutely. Right. And so it's great. I don't know if great should be the right word I use there, but it's definitely stimulating for people to have an event to just gossip about, right. To be like, oh, a celebrity is doing something unexpected in a time when celebrity image is so carefully constructed, right. You know, everyone has such control over how they're perceived to the public and because they want to be so carefully right? You know, everyone has such control over how they're perceived to the public. And because they want to be so carefully curated, you know, there's no level of insight or no level of just examination short of being one of those people who sits and combs through people's likes all day, right? And I'm not going to be one of those people. I have a job. Ultimately, the big winner here is the Oscars.

Oh, yeah. They were suffering from a huge ratings dip last year. But I feel like I'm willing to bet that next year, more people are going to be watching. Not only is the Oscars the big winner, Chris Rock is the big winner, right? If you don't think he's making two years worth of specials around this incident right like the amount of separate content that will be developed by the individuals participating in the event is infinite right yeah will and jada have mastered the ability of creating content about moving through scandal and conflict right that is something that they have been able to generate as they've had to ride through the last couple of years.

I definitely think that is something that's going to happen out of this. So maybe the three of them at least come out on top. Yes, that's for sure. It sounds like Chris Rock isn't pressing charges. No, I don't think, I think he'll be fine. And for the record, he ate the hell out of that slap. I'm just saying.

It's like I told you. Any damsel that's in distress Be out of that dress when she meet Jim West Rough neck, so go check the law on the by Watch his step, we'll flex and get a hole in your side Swallow your pride, don't let your lip react You don't wanna see my hand where my hip be at With Artemis from the start of this

Running the game, James West, Tame in the West So remember the name You can find more of Shamira Ibrahim's work at ShamiraTheFirst.com. That's S-H-A-M-I-R-A The First dot com. Our show today was edited by Matthew Collette. Fact-checked by Laura Bullard with help from Victoria Chamberlain. Engineered by Afim Shapiro and produced by Will Reed, and Hadi Mawagdi, who thinks all this drama was bad for the Oscars, but more importantly, bad for the movies. Coda winning Best Picture was a big deal,

and Hadi would rather that be the thing we're talking about in a week or two. With any luck it will be, it's today explained. I understand you're mad. Jada's mad. Her man, Will, was not nominated for concussion. I get it. I get it. Tell the truth. I get it. I get it. You get mad. Jane is mad. Her man, Will, was not nominated for concussion. I get it. I get it. Tell the truth. I get it.

I get it. You get mad. She said, it's not fair that Will was this good and didn't get nominated. You're right. It's also not fair that Will was paid $20 million for Wild Wild West. Okay? Thank you.