Will Smith had everything to revitalize his career and give him that golden prestige he lacked. The coveted Oscar was already in his hands even before he won it. He was the favorite for his role as the father of tennis players Venus and Serena Williams in The Williams Method and won the statuette he had been pursuing for years at the 94th edition of the ceremony held last Sunday at the Dolby Theater.
Of course, if a few minutes before going on stage with tears in his eyes he had not gotten up from the chair to give a loud slap to Chris Rock for making a joke of the alopecia of his wife Jada Pinkett, things would have taken another path.Very different.
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| Will Smith hands the famous slap to Chris Rock at the Oscars gala |
Normally, winning the award given by the Hollywood Academy opens the doors to new projects. But the aggression to the comedian in full gala, before millions of people who watched the Oscars, is taking its toll from the moment he left everyone stunned opting to settle a joke in bad taste with violence.
He himself decided last Friday to withdraw as a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences before the organization chaired by David Rubin "takes any disciplinary action," which could be the "suspension, expulsion or any other sanction allowed in the statutes." The actor called his performance "shocking, painful and inexcusable," he said in a statement.
But the consequences of his repudiated act do not stop there because two interesting projects that he was going to star in have been left in the air. These are Bad Boys 4, from Sony Pictures, and Fast and loose, from Netflix. The fourth installment of Two Rebel Policemen that would pair him again with Martin Lawrence would have been in development for some time.
However, the major has chosen to "put the project on pause until things are solved", as reported by The Hollywood Reporter, while the streaming platform has preferred to paralyze without giving any explanation this story centered on a criminal boss who, after losing his memory begins to connect the dots to discover that he is a double agent, affiliated with both the CIA and the crime scene.
Will Smith, during his speech at the 2022 Oscars
Before the controversial slap, Fast and Loose was already in trouble because David Leitch, who was supposed to direct it, had decided to leave the project to go to Universal Pictures to shoot Fall Guy with Ryan Gosling.
At the moment Smith has pending release Emancipation, by Antoine Fuqua for Apple TV, which is in post-production, although without a release date. The film chronicles how a runaway slave traverses the swamps of Louisiana on a tortuous journey to escape the plantation owners who nearly killed him.
He was also scheduled to appear in Peter Landesman's The Council, but it is also not known what will happen in the end with this film. The career of the once sympathetic and popular performer, the one who was loved by the public since his intervention in the mythical series The Prince of Bel-Air, is on the tightrope. We'll see how long.
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