All of the crazy stuff that happened at the Oscars that wasn't Will Smith slapping Chris Rock in the face
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“This show can be anything, but it can’t be boring,” is a real quote that first-time Oscars producer Will Packer said during an interview two weeks ago.
And after last night, Will Packer appears to have received what he wished for, albeit, probably a lot more than than what he really wanted, but that’s what you get for agreeing to produce the hellhole that is the Oscars, I guess.
As I’m sure you have heard by now, last night, during the literal televised Oscars, Will Smith slapped Chris Rock live, on-stage, after Rock made a distasteful joke about Smith’s wife.
The internet was ablaze with Takes all over the place, easily surpassing the now infamous 2016 Oscars hullabaloo surrounding the “La La Land”/“Moonlight” mixup.
There’s really not much more I have to say about that. Naturally, as you can imagine, 7,000 think pieces about the altercation have already been published today, and the internet discourse of “Will Smith could have KILLED HIM” vs “It’s totally fine and normal to hit people on live TV” has produced just like, absolutely rancid vibes.
And while it’s unfortunate that the incident happened for many obvious reasons, it’s also unfortunate because it also overshadowed a whole bunch of other wacky things that happened at the Oscars.
So here they are:
The dreaded pre-show
In an effort to cut time from the often way-too-long telecast, aforementioned “Oscars” producer Will Packer (and I’m sure some other execs) decided to relegate eight “below-the-line” awards to be presented in the hour before the show started. Victory speeches would be taped, and shown during the actual show.
The cut categories included film editing, makeup and hairstyling, original score, production design and sound as well as documentary short subject, animated short and live-action short. (Two of the winners in these categories were Riz Ahmed and Hans Zimmer, names big enough that I find it frankly insane to cast them off into the pre-show)
Naturally, this was pretty insulting to a lot of movie workers and pissed a lot of people off. And it also created a bunch of other problems!
OK, so the real show starts at 5 pm, and you have an Oscars red carpet from 2 pm-5 pm, oftentimes with the biggest celebrities coming at 4:30 pm or later, because what kind of famous person shows up early to stuff? But NOW you have a pre-show at 4 pm, honoring said famous people’s peers. So should people come to the red carpet at 3 and sit down in the theater at 4? Should people skip the red carpet altogether? Should people skip the pre-show and only do the red carpet? What’s all the media sitting on the red carpet supposed to do from 4-5? What if the pre-show ends early, like at 4:45, should people go back out to the red carpet?
You’re going to play the winners’ speeches during the main broadcast, but are you going to trim them? If so, what are you cutting? In this case, apparently you cut Riz Ahmed’s co-director’s entire speech.
How much time is this actually saving? Does it really waste that much time for people to walk to the stage?
The answer is that it saved absolutely no time! The show ran 40 minutes over.
Timothee Chalamet didn’t wear a shirt
Alt headline to this section: Timmy’s Titties make their Oscars debut
Put some clothes on him!! This sickly Victorian boy is gonna catch a cold.
Beyoncé pulls off a secret performance
Legend, icon, mysterious-birthday-poster Beyoncé opened the ceremony with a performance of her Oscar-nominated song “Be Alive.”
It was heavily rumored ahead of time that she would perform from the tennis courts of Compton, in homage to Venus and Serena Williams, who were the subjects of the movie “King Richard,” in which her song was a part of.
Which is all fine and normal. The weird thing is: When did she film this? Variety broke the news of the Compton collab almost a whole week before the ceremony. So how did she manage to film a whole segment, in broad daylight, on a very open, very public tennis court, without a single peep coming out about it? Bey, we will never know your ways.
DJ Khaled was there
WE THE BEST
The Ukrainian moment
I know, I know, making any sort of political statements during awards shows is completely pandering, insulting at worst and pointless at best. But it still felt like somebody HAD to say something, anything about the current invasion of Ukraine.
It seemed like the perfect moment would be with Mila Kunis (a Ukraine native, who has been very vocal about the atrocity) who was introducing a song performance.
But no? She heavily alluded to it, but didn’t even utter the word, “Ukraine.”
OK… fine. So what are you gonna do instead? Apparently you shoehorn in a weird moment of silence and team up with crypto.com
“We Don’t Talk About Bruno” (feat. Megan THEE Stallion)
The first crazy thing about this is that “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” wasn’t even nominated for an Oscar. For whatever reason, Disney decided not to submit the objectively most popular song from “Encanto” for any awards.
So yeah, they performed a non-Oscar nominated song at the Oscars. (I thought they were trying to save time??)
The second crazy thing about this is that they remixed it with a verse from, of course, everyone’s favorite animated children’s movie voice actress Megan THEE Stallion. (In case you were wondering, no, she has had no prior relationship to “Encanto” whatsoever.)
I love Meg, but like who is the target audience here? Me? I guess.
The In Memoriam
Look, In Memoriams are always bad — they leave important people out, they’re too corny, the tonal shift is just too abrupt — but wow, this one was truly dreadful.
Right off the bat, this came VERY soon after the Will Smith incident, so it was already super weird.
But then they tried to give it a little flair, make it not too depressing as they often are, and the results were… bad.
I was really distracted during this part trying to deal with The Slap news, but even still I took a second to be like, “Wait, wtf?”
Tony Hawk was there
In another unnecessary time suck that could have been axed in favor of the cut categories, the Oscars allocated several segments to “celebrate” the anniversaries of several classic movies, including “White Men Can’t Jump,” “Pulp Fiction,” and “James Bond.”
And who better to present one of these than… Tony Hawk, Kelly Slater and Shaun White? Because yes, those are the exact people that movie lovers want to see on screen.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that when the writers of this show came up with the line “[Bond] takes things to the extreme” a collective light bulb lit up and they were like oh snap let’s get those X Games guys in here, and well…
Jane Campion won and no one cared
Jane Campion is now the third woman in history to win an Oscar for Best Director. But there was so much going on in the night, just like, nobody talked about it.
Like, really, in 94 years, only three women have won? Insane.
The Twitter Awards
I’ve been saving the best for last.
Prior to yesterday THIS was supposed to be the most bonkers moment of the Oscars, but then, well, you know.
In yet another ploy to attempt to boost Oscars ratings, Will Packer et. al concocted the brilliant plan to create two, yes TWO, fan-voted awards, the #OscarsFanFavorite Award and the #OscarsCheerMoment. What do any of these words mean, I don’t know. What’s the difference between these two awards, I don’t know/
A few notes about these awards: People could vote by using the aforementioned hashtags on twitter, or at oscars.com. They weren’t actual awards, but the Academy really hyped them up by saying that they’d do a special presentation for them during the show.
So just to recap: The Oscars announces that it’s allowing TWITTER to vote for two awards that will be honored during the show.
Which really helps explain why this was the leaderboard leading up to the Oscars:
The frontrunners included Zach Snyder’s very mediocre “Army of the Dead,” cult classic “Sing 2,” a Johnny Depp biopic that no one has seen, and Camila Cabello’s “Cinderella.”
But maybe funnier than any of these “nominees” is the fact that nobody even saw these “awards” presented. They happened so fast, and amid the rest of the night’s chaos, I literally don’t even know who won, I have to look it up right now.
Apparently the #OscarsCheerMoment was “The Flash enters the speed force,” and all I have to say to that is: lol. Someone who worked on the Oscars had to type that text out.
And the #OscarsFanFavorite was “Army of the Dead.” The Snyder fans really came out on top this year I guess.