Assault at The Oscars

Talking of DSB I bet she'd have slapped anyone interrupting her spot

She shouldn’t. And the primary reason why she shouldn’t is that she looks absolutely beautiful. Just like Demi Moore did in GI Jane.

*shrug*

I suspect the beef between the Smiths and Rock was pre-existing, and that it really isn’t about this joke, which while it might be poor taste, is no worse than any of the other poor taste jokes made at award shows.

It’s not like he made a joke about someone who had an alcohol-affected mental health crisis that required time off a high-profile job and could have wrecked their career.

When the person in the wrong plainly apologises, where does that leave your above words?


"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," Smith said on Friday.

"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 like to think Will worked it out for himself and realised that it was better for him to offer his resignation than for him to force the Academy to suspend or revoke his membership. It might seem obvious to most people, but perhaps not so easy for him when there are so many sycophants making excuses. Hopefully this shows he's got good friends who have been honest with him.


I expect the Academy will have to make a statement too, but I expect it will walk a fine line. They need to condemn what he did, and reflect on their own inaction on the night too. But we all know that everyone wants him back in again in the future.

Apart from not being able to attend the Oscar’s ceremony (or vote for it) and being excluded from social events put on by the Academy (and bodies linked to it), will this really affect his career? Looking on IMDB it says he has 9 upcoming projects but I doubt if even a quarter of them have actually shot any footage (if that) but will this affect his draw when it comes to financing a film? Personally I think he put a brave face on through the last few years following the disclosures about his wife and other men and the Chris Rock thing in front of his peers was the last straw.

If Hollywood is that bothered and setting an example and all that, maybe it should have a think about the phenomenal number of acts of violence in the films it churns out aimed at children and young people. Is there a punch/kick/bullet/stab/rape/beheading count? That's what the teenagers stabbing and shooting each other on the streets are watching, not the Oscar ceremony.

I said 'children and young people', the rape / sexual violence plotlines turning up more in the latter, and 'certification' doesn't mean anything these days. Many people let their kids watch things like Game of Thrones.

How many acts of violence do you reckon take place in the average Marvel movie? The latest Marvel/Disney production, Moon Knight, out this week and starring an actor best known from Star Wars, is actually advertised on Disney's own twitter feed with the image of a pet goldfish in a food blender.

DisneyPlus, Marvel and the MoonKnight blue tick Twitter accounts all tweeted the image on 29th March, with thousands and thousands of 'likes'.

He carries the goldfish in the blender. To transport it. He doesn't blend it. I literally just watched it 5 minutes ago. And he uses it because it's the one thing near he grabs in his disorientation. 

And I'd hope that most people know the difference between Marvel superheroes smashing villains and actual violence in the real life big, bad world. 

The image was released before the show opened, and no, I'm not going to watch a series that chooses that image of the thousands it could have chosen for its promo material. When I was at art college in the 1990s some a-hole put a goldfish in a blender. It's not an 'innocent' image.

Most people, but not all. I heard a well known male actor defending the sexual violence in one of his films saying no normal person would be turned on by that. It's not 'normal' people I worry about when I'm walking down the street at night, and the watch and rewatch pause, gif culture is very different from the linear form of narrative viewing of old. The teenage gang who punched a friend of mine to death went home and watched a violent gangland film immediately afterwards. A group of young men involved in drug gang violence interviewed on the radio recently described how when they walked the streets they thought of themselves as being in a violent computer game, detached from reality. A Clockwork Orange was withdrawn for years because of a copycat killing and attacks. A sex worker who was quite well known near my school was murdered in Jack the Ripper style attack the week a Ripper drama was shown on TV.

No, but I think the attitude now is that with streaming/internet/twitter real dead body and beheading videos, the floodgates have opened regarding who has access to what, so anything goes, so who cares anymore? There's a good radio programme (still on iplayer, I think) called Body Count Rising on the trend towards sexual violence in screen drama, and a generation is growing up who spend more of their leisure time immersed in a virtual world of fantasy and gaming than learning how to interact with real human beings face to face in the real one. Films that were late night when I was a kid are mid afternoon now. Last Sunday's BBC1 primetime 9pm period drama featured a throat cutting/garotting with piano wire and a naked man having his genitals hacked off - that sort of image used to be late night BBC2 or Ch4, if shown at all. The same screenwriter did a recent version of A Christmas Carol with a scene where Scrooge forces Mrs Cratchit to strip naked to humiliate her. Edgy, pushing the envelope? Do we need that envelope pushing? Is it making society less or more desensitised and violent? That's the discussion I'd like Hollywood and Silicone Valley to be having, not hysteria on one of the rare times a tiny bit of violence actually seeps into their gilded halls.

There’s plenty of violence in tv shows and movies of course. But they all go through certification to make sure they are appropriately labelled so people know what they are getting into. Even some streaming shows now include trigger warnings at the start.

If young people end up watching this content then that’s bad parenting. Same way that if a child is playing the latest Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto game. It’s not the fault of the developers when the game is clearly labelled as an 18.

Why would there be any hysteria in Hollywood about this? They have certification boards to make sure that all of the content is appropriately vetted. It’s then down to us as the audience to decide what we then want to watch.