This Stuff Just Goes!
By: Tommy “Tj” Sotomayor

Oscars’ ‘punishment’ for Will Smith slap is pathetic and weak

The morons who run the Oscars gave Will Smith an amazing gift on Friday.

For violently assaulting comedian Chris Rock onstage in front of millions of viewers after Rock made a crack about Smith’s wife Jada Pinkett Smith, the 53-year-old actor was banned from the next 10 years of Academy Awards ceremonies.

We should all be so lucky!

Smith, who treated a glamorous primetime telecast like 2 a.m. at a roadside bar in Wichita, egregiously gets to keep the shiny Best Actor statuette he won for “King Richard,” now surely nestled on the shelf next to his 10 hard-won Kids’ Choice Awards. 

No criminal charges have been filed against the actor for storming up to another man, slapping him so hard it made a noise in a 3,400-seat theater and then yelling, “Get my wife’s name out of your f–king mouth!” on live TV.

And, if its current inaction is any indication, the FCC will let him be.

Imagine how difficult this situation must be for this poor A-lister. Smith’s net worth is $350 million, and he’s been nursing his emotional wounds in a $42 million mansion in Calabasas, California. The 1,500-thread-count Egyptian cotton bed sheets are surely stained with tears. And he must be running out of Krug, too drained to ask his personal assistant to go buy more. These are hardships you and I could scarcely fathom.

And now Smith’s only consequence from the Academy for an offense that would get just about anybody else in the world a visit from a policeman and the ax from their employer is that he cannot attend the Oscars for a decade. (Smith, himself, chose to resign from the Academy.) 

This … is a punishment?

Bear in mind that Smith isn’t exactly Meryl Streep, with a reserved seat at the Oscars like it’s a standing table at Rao’s. “King Richard” was his first Academy Award nomination of any kind since 2007’s “The Pursuit of Happyness” 15 years ago. The only photographic evidence of Smith attending the Academy Awards for any reason since 2010 was when he was a presenter in 2014.  

You see, banning Will Smith from the Oscars is like banning me from the gym: I wasn’t planning on going anyway. The gym is boring and pushes me to my limit. So do the Oscars. Smith makes prestige movies as often as I do pushups, and he likely would never have been nominated again. This ban is totally meaningless.

But, what did we expect from our hypocritical Hollywood overlords? 

Isn’t it so typical how, when not violently assaulting comedians or committing heinous #MeToo crimes, filmmakers lecture us ad nauseam about our behavior and our beliefs and our accountability in our normal world that they show such disdain for, when they treat their own enormously unstable community like a kindergarten full of toddlers who still can’t tie their shoes? Today, they sent teary Little Willy to the time-out corner. That’s it.

If you needed more proof that celebrities do not believe that they are beholden to the same basic rules that you and I are, here it is, folks!

Now, Will Smith will get the pleasure of doing what most Americans do already: not watching the Oscars.