The Academy of Oscars decided this Friday, April 8 to ban Will Smith from any ceremony or event that it will organize for a period of ten years, as punishment for the slap that the actor had dealt to the comedian Chris Rock in the middle of a gala evening at the end of March.
“Mr. Smith will not be permitted to attend any Academy event or program, in person or virtually,” whether or not it is the Oscars, and effective immediately, the Academy’s board of directors wrote in a statement. the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which met Friday morning.
The Academy has accepted Will Smith’s resignation, which he submitted last week, but did not strip him of the Best Actor Oscar he received last month for ‘The Williams Method’ . “I accept and respect the decision of the Academy,” responded Will Smith in a brief written statement.
Actions “shocking, painful and inexcusable”
The Friday morning meeting of the Academy’s board of directors, attended by stars such as Steven Spielberg and Whoopi Goldberg, was part of the disciplinary proceedings initiated against the actor after his slap in the middle of the gala evening of the Oscars.
A ceremony “overshadowed by the unacceptable and harmful behavior of Mr. Smith on the stage. During our television broadcast, we did not react properly to the situation. We are sorry about that,” Academy President David Rubin and CEO Dawn Hudson said on Friday. “We want to express our deepest gratitude to Mr. Rock for keeping his cool in these extraordinary circumstances,” they add in their statement.
Will Smith, 53, took everyone by storm, resigning on his own last week. “My actions at the 94th Academy Awards were shocking, painful and inexcusable,” the actor wrote, five days after taking the stage to slap comedian Chris Rock who had just made a joke about his close-cropped hair. wife.
Will Smith, 53, took everyone by storm, resigning on his own last week. “My actions at the 94th Academy Awards were shocking, painful and inexcusable,” the actor wrote, five days after taking the stage to slap comedian Chris Rock who had just made a joke about his close-cropped hair. wife.
Jada Pinkett Smith went public a few years ago with alopecia , a condition that causes severe hair loss. A few tens of minutes after the slap, Will Smith returned to the Oscars stage to receive the best actor award for his role in “The Williams Method”.
He hadn’t made any act of contrition at the time, contenting himself with castigating “people who disrespect you” and saying that “love makes you do crazy things”. It wasn’t until the next day, after the Academy announced an internal investigation into the incident, that the actor issued an apology to Chris Rock and the organizers. He then pleaded to have reacted “emotionally” to “a joke about Jada’s health problem”.
Chris Rock does not press charges
Last Friday when finally announcing his resignation, Will Smith admitted to having “betrayed the confidence of the Academy. I deprived other candidates and winners of the chance to celebrate their extraordinary work”. “I will accept all the consequences that the board of directors deems appropriate”, he added in his text.
Voices were raised to demand that Will Smith be stripped of his Oscar, but others pointed out that neither Harvey Weinstein , a former Hollywood mogul convicted of rape and sexual assault, nor director Roman Polanski had been forced to return their statuettes after being expelled from the Academy.
The day after the incident, the actress Whoopi Goldberg herself had considered that this eventuality was unlikely concerning Will Smith. “There will be consequences, I’m sure, but I don’t think that’s what they’re going to do, especially because Chris” Rock has decided not to press charges, she had said on television.
For his part, the comedian has not spoken publicly about this incident. “I’m still digesting what happened. So at some point I’m going to talk about this stuff. And it will be serious and funny”, he said on March 30 at the start of a show.