While tweeting his support for Chris Rock, Alec Baldwin compared the 2022 Oscars to “The Jerry Springer Show.”
“I’m not reading much about how, or even if,” Baldwin commented on Monday about comic Chris Farley being smacked onstage by Will Smith for making a joke about his wife.
“But,” the star continued, “I adore you, @chrisrock.” “I’m also sorry the Oscars have devolved into a Jerry Springer spectacle.”
Smith stormed the stage and slapped Rock in the face for making a bald joke about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, who suffers from alopecia.
“Keep my wife’s name out of your f–king mouth,” the actor said twice as he returned to his seat.
Rock appeared upset but attempted to keep the event on track — to the point where half of the internet believed the slap was staged.
The line was ad-libbed, and the slap was real, according to ABC executive Rob Mills, who was seated in the Oscars production trailer with showrunners at the time.
Mills told Variety that the crew didn’t comprehend the gravity of the situation until they heard swear words.
“When Chris, who knows the limits of broadcast standards, stated, ‘Will Smith slapped the s–t out of me,’ you started to believe this is true,” he continued. “At that point, it became clear that this wasn’t a joke.”
Mills said that if the show had been pre-taped, “we would have stopped down. Things would have been addressed. But here, you have to remember you’ve got a show to do. Obviously this was something that was unfortunate, but it was not to a degree that you think, ‘OK, we need to just stop the entire show.’ And the show just kind of went on.”
The Academy has since launched a “formal review” into the incident and will “explore further action and consequences in accordance with our Bylaws, Standards of Conduct and California law.”
Moments after the debacle, Smith won Best Actor for his role in “King Richard,” a biographical film in which he played Venus and Serena’s father, Richard Williams.
During his acceptance speech, he apologized to everyone except Rock. On Monday afternoon, however, Smith took to social media to apologize to Rock for his “unacceptable” and “embarrassing” actions.
Ironically, Baldwin knows a thing or two about coming to his wife’s defense. The actor took to Instagram in December 2020 to defend Hilaria Baldwin from online hate after it was revealed that her real name is Hillary and she was born in Boston, not Spain.
And while no punches were thrown, Baldwin settled a lawsuit earlier this year stemming from a 2018 scuffle over a parking space.