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Two and a half hours into the 94th Annual Academy Awards, I was putting the final touches on the night’s stories and idly browsing the last of the red-carpet shade tweets, convinced that all the rest of my evening held was a change into jammies and potentially half of a sleep-aiding CBD gummy. Then, suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere, it happened: Presenter Chris Rock made an ugly joke about Jada Pinkett-Smith’s hair loss, and her husband, Will Smith, charged the stage, striking Rock and shouting, “Keep my wife’s name out of your f*cking mouth.”
As if that weren’t enough Will Smith-related turmoil for one ceremony, mere moments later, Smith was called onstage to accept the best-actor Oscar for his performance in King Richard. During his speech, he tearfully apologized to the Academy and to his fellow nominees, adding that “love will make you do crazy things.” The discourse surged instantly, with some arguing that an actor committing assault onstage at the Oscars was beyond the pale, and others responding that there needed to be consequences for Rock’s mockery of a Black woman’s chronic illness. (While we’re on that particular topic, let’s all recall the time John Wayne had to be physically restrained from attacking an Indigenous woman at the Oscars because she had the audacity to call for industry equality. And, while we’re discussing beyond-the-pale Oscars behavior, let’s not forget that Roman Polanski was awarded a statuette after fleeing the country to avoid consequences for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old in 1977. Violence is never okay, of course, but it would be nice to hear more of that rhetoric when the perpetrator of that violence isn’t a Black man.)
After all of that—to use the technical phrase—bonkers-ness, it was hard to imagine the night ever returning to an even keel, and indeed, it didn’t. However, a well-timed joking reaction from host Amy Schumer helped to put the evening’s events in context. While her performance as host over the course of the night didn’t rub me entirely the right way (one Leo-DiCaprio-dates-young-women joke felt particularly stale, and her tossed-off shoutout to trans people losing their rights in Texas and across the country came across as a borderline-insulting afterthought), her droll reaction to the Smith/Rock dust-up was perfection.
“I’ve been getting out of that Spider-Man costume. Did I miss anything? There’s, like, a different vibe in here,” Schumer joked as she took the stage after the incident, in what I’m choosing to perceive as a reference to writer Allison P. Davis’s excellent article. Schumer received a fist-bump from Tiffany Haddish, one of the night’s best presenters, before answering her own question: “Oh, well. Probably not.”
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