Will Smith Is a Violent, Cowardly, Unhinged, Entitled Narcissist

As Dore points out here, Michael Moore was forced off the stage during his acceptance speech for saying that the United States government had committed war crimes, but they’re not even playing music to tell Smith that his time is up the way most winners are when they get too long-winded. Here, he’s just allowed to make excuse after excuse why he has to use violence as a God-appointed defender of women from words.

While I agree that Harvey Weinstein and Roman Polanski did worse things than Smith to deserve having their Academy Awards revoked, the people praising Will Smith for using violence in response to words as “chivalrous” are dangerously unhinged. The person who punches first in a verbal argument admits that their opponent has a better argument. I hope many directors will see his assault of Chris Rock in this light and refuse to work with him as too volatile to feel safe around. Many cowards have found my behavior horrifying, to use “Realty Check”‘s words, such as when I was arrested for yelling at the HRA office, but even when I was being violently assaulted, I knew better than to punch back because I knew I was being watched on surveillance and that there would be negative consequences for me had the beating turned into a fight. I also agree with the point that this could be considered workplace violence over which the Academy has direct supervision and responsibility, which was not the case with either Weinstein or Polanski. Do we really want to go back to the days when Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s films were preemptively destroyed before he was acquitted of a rape and wrongful death charge?

Reverend Paul James Tenaglia mentioned playing Tony in a touring production of West Side Story noting that a method actor had gotten so deeply into the role of Bernardo that he was hitting people, and the producers had to fire him. Smith wasn’t even method-acting here. He was showing his true violent colors, making excuses for them, and crying for sympathy.

The scene was entirely censored in the network broadcast, apparently being on a several-second delay. Last I heard you needed to have a subscription to a streaming service to watch it online, so I watched it on TV At first, I thought something had happened to the reception because I didn’t see the slap, and Smith’s initial rant was muted. I quickly figured out that Smith was spewing obscenities, and they were silencing him, but I didn’t know he had hit Rock until the recap in the nightly news following the Academy Awards broadcast, which made the significance of a lot of his comments in his acceptance speech unclear to me until I saw it again.