Will Smith Is Melting Down After Being Forced To Resign From The Academy And Apologize To Its Heads And The Oscars Producer Claims LAPD Wanted To Arrest Smith And Drag Him Out Of The Awards Show But Chris Rock Prevented It
Deadline - Two days after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Board of Governors initiated self-described “disciplinary proceedings” against Will Smith over his slap of Chris Rock at Sunday’s Oscars, the “heartbroken” King Richard Best Actor winner today has pre-empted the harshest punishment that he could have received and left the organization voluntarily.
Sources said Smith was told by the Academy that he likely could be expelled for a decade or more. That possibility prompted Smith, who has been an AMPAS member since 2001, to jump today before he was pushed in hopes of defusing the situation.
Here is the full statement Smith provided to Deadline today:
I have directly responded to the Academy’s disciplinary hearing notice, and I will fully accept any and all consequences for my conduct. My actions at the 94th Academy Awards presentation were shocking, painful, and inexcusable. The list of those I have hurt is long and includes Chris, his family, many of my dear friends and loved ones, all those in attendance, and global audiences at home. I betrayed the trust of the Academy. I deprived other nominees and winners of their opportunity to celebrate and be celebrated for their extraordinary work. I am heartbroken. I want to put the focus back on those who deserve attention for their achievements and allow the Academy to get back to the incredible work it does to support creativity and artistry in film. So, I am resigning from membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and will accept any further consequences the Board deems appropriate.
Change takes time and I am committed to doing the work to ensure that I never again allow violence to overtake reason.
On March 30, after a sometimes-contentious virtual meeting of the more than 50 Governors including the likes of Steven Spielberg, Ava DuVernay and Rita Wilson, Smith was informed that he had 15 days to respond in writing to their assertion that he violated the Academy’s standards of conduct with his violent behavior on March 27. The group then was scheduled to meet on April 18 to decide Smith’s fate.
“We have received and accepted Mr. Will Smith’s immediate resignation from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,” AMPAS president David Rubin said in a statement Friday. “We will continue to move forward with our disciplinary proceedings against Mr. Smith for violations of the Academy’s Standards of Conduct, in advance of our next scheduled board meeting on April 18.”
I think its safe to say that you can trace all of The Fresh Prince's problems back to one pivotal, and deep wound.
Yes, that scene right there.
Unhealed child wounds are things we carry with us through life that rear their ugly head and cause our monkey brains to make decisions and do things to protect us from being hurt again. (That's 5 years of therapy talking right there folks)
So I'm not saying that the Fresh Prince's father leaving him high and dry to head back to Philly, and him crying in his uncle's arms (r.i.p.) is the reason he lashed out and slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars. But I'm not not saying it either.
It's been a downward spiral for Smith since last week.
Things were kept pretty under wraps in terms of what happened, but it's all coming out now.
And I mean all of it.
For starters, a video of Jada Pinkett ̶l̶o̶o̶k̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶h̶o̶r̶r̶i̶f̶i̶e̶d̶ laughing when Smith slapped Rock has surfaced.
Which leads one to ask what kind of twisted, demented personality are we dealing with here? Wouldn't a sane person who loved their partner be shook as fuck by this outburst and the implications? Maybe not? But I think that's psychopathic behavior to just cackle at your "husband" pulling a move like that on national television in front of a room of movie stars and Hollywood execs.
The producer of the show also went on the record telling the story how Chris Rock prevented Will Smith from being taken out of the show, and away in handcuffs by LAPD.
Deadline - Will Packer, producer of this year’s Oscars, said in an interview with ABC News’ Good Morning America that Los Angeles Police Department officers came to his office on Sunday evening and spoke to Chris Rock about filing charges against Will Smith following the now infamous slapping incident.
“They were saying, ‘This is battery.’ That was the word they used in that moment,” Packer told GMA‘s T.J. Holmes. “They said, ‘We will go get him. We are prepared. We will go get him right now. You can press charges. We can arrest him. They were laying out the options. And as they were talking, Chris was, he was being very dismissive of those options. He was like, ‘No, I’m fine. He was like no, no, no. And even to the point where I said, ‘Rock, let them finish. The LAPD officers finish laying out what his options were. And they said, ‘Would you like us to take any action? And he said no.”
In the aftermath of the slap, Packer felt like the energy was "sucked completely out of" the theater. "It was like somebody poured concrete in that room," he recalled. "It was this feeling of, 'What just happened? Is this real? How am I supposed to react?' So it sucked the life out of that room and it never came back."
"I think what many of us were hoping was that he would go on that stage and make it better," Packer said of Smith's tearful acceptance speech. "It couldn't have been made right in that moment because of what happened. But I think that we were hoping that he could make it better. That he would stand on that stage and say, 'What just happened minutes ago was absolutely and completely wrong. Chris Rock, I'm so sorry. Please forgive me.' That's what I was hoping for. … I was hoping that if he stayed, he said that."
What a fuckin WILD scene that would have been had Rock not taken the high road of all high roads and allowed Smith to maintain his dignity. Probably the only way that a crazier scene could have got crazier would have been shots of Smith getting taken away in cuffs.
The next day, Smith was on the phone with only a handful of the academy board members and it appears he spent most of his time stating his case and not being very conciliatory.
A previously undisclosed short virtual meeting between Will Smith and Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences President David Rubin and CEO Dawn Hudson on March 29 could be causing a new crisis to hit the Oscar organization.
The new shockwave is hitting hard because those in the Academy’s Board of Governors meeting yesterday beginning disciplinary procedures against Smith weren’t in the know.
“Why would they keep this from us?” exclaimed one insider who participated in Wednesday’s board meeting. “It only contributes to an atmosphere of suspicion and lack of leadership.”
With seemingly contradictory information now swirling about how Smith was allegedly asked and refused to exit the Dolby Theatre after striking Rock, the efforts by the nearly 50-member Board of Governors to find an appropriate solution to the situation by its next April 18 scheduled meeting could be fracturing based on news of Rubin and Hudson’s March 29 virtual meeting with Smith.
Will's new movie projects have also now been put on hold supposedly- including BAD BOYS 4???
(Sidebar- how the fuck are they making a Bad Boys 4? Seriously guys? Bad Boys 2 was pushing it. You nailed it but you should have stopped there. 3 was a disaster and I thought for sure that was all she wrote. But apparently not.)
Vulture - The Hollywood Reporter reported that Netflix has allegedly “slowed down” the development of Smith’s Fast and Loose. Multiple factors may have contributed to the decision; the attached director, David Leitch, reportedly backed out of the project a week before the Oscars to work on Ryan Gosling’s Fall Guy. Without a director attached and in the wake of the Slap, THR shared that Netflix reportedly put the project on hold. THR also reported that Bad Boys 4 is allegedly on hold following the events of Sunday’s ceremony, despite Smith receiving 40 pages of the script prior to the Slap. Smith’s Apple TV+ drama Emancipation is currently in post-production, set to premiere sometime in 2022. However, Apple has not announced a formal release date.
At the end of the day in a fucked up way I feel bad for Will Smith. He's obviously not a bad person. But he clearly isn't all there right now and probably needs some help. His head is all fucked up clearly via mental abuse from his significant other. If roles were reversed we'd have every feminist on the planet calling for Will Smith's head for damaging Jada Pinkett through infidelity and mental manipulation to the point she's assaulting people in public.
After all, he warned us all decades ago