Sunday, March 27, 2022
I was stirring my chicken tikki masla over the stove when IT happened. You know what I'm talking about. It! That thing that happened at the Oscars that somehow superseded the 1974 streaking episode while David Niven was announcing the next award. Calling out the wrong Best Picture has nothing on this moment. Same with Vanessa Redrave's acceptance speech and Paddy Chayevsky's brutal retort. Snow White and Rob Lowe are child's play compared to this OMG moment. Nope, this is the new #1 most outrageous Oscars moment ever. Nothing comes close to it. I'm still processing what I saw. I was in the kitchen, watching the awards show on Alice's small, spatter-stained kitchen digital portable, listening to Chris Rock and stirring my chicken masala, when boom...blank...no sound...then seconds later, a somewhat bewildered Chris Rock carrying on. I had that very uncomfortable "something is wrong" feeling that lately I'm less inclined to engage in, but I needed to know what had just happened. It was a TV emergency that only Twitter could straighten out in real time. I grabbed my iPad, jumped onto Twitter and typed #Oscars and #ChrisRock. For the first minute or so, I was seeing nothing but "WTF" and "What just happened?" Then came the uncut Japanese feed. Oh damn. Holy shit! WTF x 10! It didn't look fake at all and certainly the screaming expletives from Will Smith in his seat were 100% real. You can't fake that degree of rage. It was shocking, embarrassing, beyond uncomfortable, and just plain surreal. Only an emotionally unhinged narcissist bully of the highest order would do such a thing, and yet it was Will Smith, everybody's congenial, lovable fresh prince who was about to be crowned king. Which he was an hour or so later. I did not want him to win, not after that shocking mini-performance of A Star is Born, but he won and proceeded to give an emotionally self-absorbed justification of what had happened earlier. Oh wow. Here was this new weeping king, taking in his very own Mel Gibson moment. It was Shakespearian. Life just keeps on giving and giving and giving. He apologized to everyone except Chris Rock. I guess he hasn't alerted himself yet that the bad guy isn't Chris, but the guy with the trophy getting the standing ovation. It was just one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen on television. Man oh man. I've always been protective of comedians. Always. They have the most difficult job on the planet, which is to make people laugh and constantly keep their material raw, relevant and on the cusp of acceptable. I didn't even understand Chris Rock's joke (had to look it up), and when I did understand it, it was like, okay, not very funny, but also nowhere near what Ricky Gervais has delivered. Not even close. The whole thing made no sense. Clearly, there are things going on in Will Smith's life that belie the persona he has perfected for his fans. How on earth does a person punch/slap a comedian on stage live in front of millions of viewers, then win the Best Actor Oscar an hour later? If it were in a book, the reader would go, yeah, right, then toss the book in the trash. Oh well. I needed something to distract me from the depressing Ukraine war.
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