At this point, the internet has been awash with reactions and debates in the aftermath of an incident at the 94th Academy Awards that saw Will Smith slap Chris Rock for making a joke at Jada Pinkett Smith’s expense.
And in the hours before Smith made his public apology to Rock and all others affected by his actions, we have learned that while Rock is apparently not interested in pursuing legal consequences for Smith, the Academy is conducting a formal review of his membership.
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But while most viewers were keen to keep their eyes on Smith in the aftermath of the incident and especially when he would end up winning the Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role, Jim Carrey’s eyes were elsewhere.
As he recently expressed during an interview, he saw the crowd’s reaction to Smith’s win as a reason to indict Hollywood itself.
Speaking to Gayle King on CBS This Morning, Jim Carrey shared how he felt after watching this year’s Oscars unfold.
And while he would discuss the slap with King, it wasn’t the act itself that seemed to bother him the most. Instead, that moment occurred when Smith accepted his award.
As he put it, “I was sickened by the standing ovation. I felt like Hollywood is just spineless en masse.”
And when King mentioned that anyone else would have been escorted out by security or arrested for doing what Smith did that night, Carrey opined that Smith should have faced the same fate.
In his words, “I’d have announced this morning that I was suing Will for 200 million dollars because that video’s going to be there forever. It’s going to be ubiquitous, you know that insult is going to last a very long time.”
For him, it’s one thing to yell from the audience when you disapprove of a joke or say something on Twitter afterwards, but it’s quite another to make your reaction physical.
As he said, “You do not have the right to walk up on stage and smack somebody in the face because they said words.”
He also dismissed King’s notion that there had been escalation before the slap.
As he saw it, that would imply that that the slap didn’t came out of nowhere because of Smith’s own personal frustrations. So any talk of escalation didn’t strike him as an accurate way to characterize the situation.
As we can see in the full video, Carrey also made a point of noting that he doesn’t have any personal animosity against Smith.
He also acknowledged the professional and personal achievements he’s had in life, saying, “I don’t have anything against Will Smith, he’s done great things.”
Nonetheless, he felt that Smith’s admirable qualities don’t change the impact his actions had on an important night for so many people.
In his words, “It cast a pall over everybody’s shining moment last night. You know, a lot of people worked really hard to get to that place and to have their moment in the sun.”
