New Black Hollywood is resetting the terms of race, gender, and art.
Will Smith deserved his Academy Award at Sunday night’s Oscar ceremonies — not for his mush-mouthed performance in King Richard but for his more instructive display of Millennial black male confusion.
No one should feel superior to what has been called Smith’s “lack of self-control” when he walked on stage and slapped comic Chris Rock, or to Smith’s teary-eyed conflation of shame and ego when he later accepted an Oscar as Best Actor. Both moments ripped the lid off the Oscar charade in which mainstream media pretend to uphold values they have abandoned long ago.
Smith’s outbursts also revealed the unhealthy standards that have overtaken our culture, confounding ideas about race, gender, and art.
Will and Race
Another Will — Will Packer, who produced the Oscar telecast — previously produced the third-rate race movies Think Like a Man, Girls Trip, and Obsessed. So this assignment was a career upgrade in an industry committed to flaunting political correctness, making race, gender, and liberal politics its focus. Packer’s mission to increase the show’s racial (black) quotient unbalanced its usual feminist, lefty bias.
Packer made this the hip-hop Oscars — where black American culture, today the most degraded yet politically manipulated it has ever been, would set the show’s criterion. (It was sponsored and broadcast by Disney/ABC, the network that, with shows such as Good Morning America and The View or prime time’s blackish and Abbott High, is most committed to race-based programming.) Hip-hop clichés ruled, from a DJ replacing the usual movie-theme orchestra (lest viewers mistakenly expect learned black musicians) to numerous black celebrity appearances and a raucous peanut gallery suspiciously miked to emphasize audience participation, as on the BET and Soul Train awards.
This was the setting in which Will Smith, the most successful movie star to emerge from hip-hop, took the front-row, king-of-Hollywood seat formerly reserved for Jack Nicholson. Hollywood tradition was revamped — ignored just like eight of the award categories Packer had eliminated from the broadcast. (Airtime was needed for Beyoncé’s musical tribute to Compton, home of Venus and Serena Williams and the setting of King Richard, depicted in a kitschy tennis-ball fantasia.) Packer made it Smith’s turf.
These are the terms by which Smith’s walk onto the stage continued the racial prerogative displayed last year when Regina King opened the show by strutting forth to proclaim her pride as “a black mother,” a narcissistic way of congratulating the Academy’s wokeness. Such a show of will — as in racialized resolve and determination — is acted out at the Academy’s behest.
Both Wills understand that hip-hop cred can be traded for Hollywood-hustler opportunity, but few others realized that its street primacy was inevitable. Former Oscar host Chris Rock appeared secure in his status as Hollywood jester, but his attempt at celeb bonhomie hit the roadblock of unpredictable hip-hop egotism. And so the personal drive and private motivation behind the world’s favorite swaggering verbal invention — knowable only through aggressive performance and creativity — resulted in what’s commonly known as a “bitch-slap.”
It happened on stage, but it resembled a behind-the-scenes, at-the-club rap battle. If America failed to heed Eminem’s 8 Mile and Joseph Kahn’s remarkable Bodied, about hip-hop ethos, all America knows that ethos now. Smith showed his superiority to Eminem after the slap, when he returned to his seat and shouted twice to Rock the lesson that the slap was intended to teach: “Keep my wife’s name out your f***ing mouth!” This was hip-hop — with a “Yes!” linking the two declarations. Smith, glib talent and untrained street actor, has never been more convincing than when announcing the shocking terms of the arrival of New Black Hollywood. Throughout Hollywood’s fabled lore (such as the infamous Jennings Lang–Walter Wanger castration dispute), only studio bosses talked like that. Rappers call such language “boss.” The drag world calls it “realness.” We are hypocrites to pretend otherwise.
Will and Gender
Equally unsettling was the Oscar show’s not-clever, unfunny feminism. Three female hosts representing a range of unpleasant post-Madonna, post-Pelosi postures hit bottom when Regina Hall’s skit reversed the sexual impropriety that has shaken the industry’s self-confidence and bared its double standards. (Wanda Sykes even got in a Harvey Weinstein jab.) But Will Smith, showing suave modesty that’s gone unmentioned, refused to participate in Hall’s lewdness. This reserve belongs to his quaint early style of hip-hop that sometimes acknowledged masculine, patriarchal discretion. That slap didn’t have to be an act of chivalry (although that, too, occurs in hip-hop) to express Smith’s indignation. It was part of Smith’s do-gooder psychological split — at its best in After Earth and Concussion and at its least convincing in The Pursuit of Happyness, Ali, and King Richard.
Will and Art
The acceptance speech and impromptu apology will stand as the most compelling moments of Will Smith’s career. But the emotional mash-up invites us to examine the very human behavior that the Oscars — full of self-righteous self-congratulation — have squandered. Could anyone reasonably expect civility from a show celebrating films full of the ugliest human behavior? Will Smith, this year’s Oscar representative, is another victim of the degradation that hip-hop (through showbiz and political manipulation) has inflicted on society — especially among black men. The Fresh Prince of Bel Air is clearly an upwardly mobile lie disguising the inner turmoil that came out of Smith on Oscar night.
It is disingenuous to expect Smith to be the Fresh Prince or to doubt his sincere confusion. If Denzel Washington’s phony evangelism — “At your highest point, that’s when the devil comes for you,” he warned Smith — represents advice from Smith’s best role model in the industry, no wonder Smith is in trouble. Yet that feeble grasping for black gospel fundamentals is preferable to the night’s most specious address: Jessica Chastain’s acceptance speech as winner of the Best Actress award for her role in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a speech in which she simultaneously sought LGBTQ favor and threw Tammy Faye Bakker’s spirituality under the bus.
For a performer who began as an entertainer to receive Academy Award recognition only when he essays pseudo biopics of nonthreatening black men proves that Will Smith has always had trouble reconciling his own life with art. It’s a quandary unique to how black pop culture — hip-hop specifically — has failed to answer the needs of its audience and participants.
Even hip-hop comedian Chris Rock suffers this confusion; his dubious humor (why must a person’s physical appearance be the occasion for jokes?) makes the quiddities of black experience acceptable to outsiders — similar to the way conservatives admire the adversarial comics Bill Maher and Jon Stewart. No one could be faulted for seeing the incident as a slap-back at the showbiz establishment’s most obnoxious figure.
Ambivalence is the best way to feel about this. Instead of the Academy’s punishing Will Smith (who simply wasn’t mature enough to just walk out on the circus as Eddie Murphy did in 2007), some screenwriter should be inspired to help him in his search for art and for moral equilibrium. Will Smith has embarrassingly exposed himself. But he exposes the Oscars’ race-baiting hypocrisy, too.