Credit:Matt Golding
For context,we should perhaps acknowledge that Smith talked in his recently published autobiography about the searing impact of seeing his mother get punched in the head by his father when he was a child. “My father tormented me,” he said of their complex relationship. “And he was also one of the greatest men I’ve ever known. He was one of the greatest blessings of my life,and also one of my greatest sources of pain.”
Perhaps some of those who rushed to console,comfort or advise Smith were aware of this,and saw in his over-the-top response to some good old-fashioned roasting – the sort of thing for which Ricky Gervais has been lionised in recent years – signs of a man struggling with a complex psychological inheritance.
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Rock,meanwhile,simply vanished. He wasn’t seen again in the telecast. No one put their arms around him. When Smith apologised it was to the Academy,not to the man he’d attacked. Perhaps reading the room,Rock reportedly later advised that he would not be pressing charges.
The incident was thuggish,the response to it graceless. It felt uncomfortably like siding with the perpetrator rather than the victim of an act that should never have happened,and absolutely should not have been endorsed.
After the dismal ratings slide of last year,the Oscars got the attention it desperately craved. But decency demands it should have responded to Smith’s actions with something more than a standing ovation and a hug.