Will Smith’s thuggery exposes Hollywood hypocrites – David Behrens

But when push comes to shove, will it have the bottle to write off one of its most bankable stars for behaving in a way that even John Rambo would have considered inappropriate?

It wasn’t just Will Smith’s physical assault on his fellow actor Chris Rock at this week’s ceremony that was so shocking; it was his potty-mouthed threat of further violence – shouted not once but twice – that rendered him unworthy of being named best actor. Or best anything else.

Yes, he had taken offence at a joke delivered by Rock which contained a reference to his wife’s alopecia – but it was a mock insult that did not grossly overstep the boundaries of what is acceptable at showbusiness “roasts” such as this. Bob Hope made a career out of them. Indeed, Rock’s scripted line would have passed through several producers before being deemed innocuous for the culturally tepid waters of American network television.

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But Smith’s instinctive response – to walk on stage uninvited, slap Rock hard in the face and then threaten him in language that had to be bleeped – marked him out as a thug. Had he been a nobody, he would have been marched out of the auditorium and out of town.

It’s the fact that Smith is very much a Somebody that the film industry finds so hard to reconcile. For as much as it would like us to believe that it has become a beacon for cultural inclusivity, the fact is that in Hollywood money talks louder than anything else – and Smith generates a great deal of it. Without stars like him, the ecosystem of writers, directors and all the others who make the town tick would simply not exist. That’s why the talk this weekend is of contrition, not cancellation; redemption rather than retribution.

Only the most shameless hypocrite could argue that hitting someone squarely in the face is acceptable while hurting someone’s feelings is not. But the Academy is good at hypocrisy – for while it made a show this year of having three female hosts, it’s really not long since it named Roman Polanski best director in his absence even though he had pleaded guilty to having sex with a minor and fled to Paris to avoid prison.

Besides, Hollywood understands physical violence; it has spent a century glorifying it – and partly as a result it has become part of the American way of life. The only surprise is that it has taken until now for a backstage punch-up to be played out before the cameras.

Yet fame is fragile, and the history of the movies is littered with fallen stars who were trodden into the cutting room floor in less time than it took to shout ‘That’s a wrap’. From Fatty Arbuckle to Kevin Spacey, theirs are the stories of which disaster movies are made.

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In Smith’s case, it will be for the public to decide his fate. If we continue turning up to see the likes of Suicide Squad and Bad Boys II his current disgrace will be forgiven; if not, he will find himself keeping company with Mel Gibson and Roseanne Barr in the far corner of some Hollywood party. So far, the sympathy vote seems to be for Rock, whose concert ticket sales have apparently gone through the roof.

What the incident has certainly exposed – as if it were in doubt – is the shallowness of those of us in the audience. The invasion of Ukraine registered only a relative blip on the Richter scale of social media activity compared to the seismic shock of the Smith-Rock fallout. Perhaps it was because we didn’t want to think of the consequences of a war in Europe, whereas a film star making a spectacle of himself is a piece of entertainment in which we can allow ourselves to revel.

We’ll have to wait and see if there is a Hollywood ending to all this. Will they let Smith sit on the front row next time, or even let him inside? And if they do, will the ceremony take place on a stage or in a boxing ring? Not coincidentally, it’s exactly the sort of cliffhanger on which the industry thrives.

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