Oscars scandals through the years

The Oscar Slap, in which Will Smith slapped Chris Rock on the stage at the 2022 Academy Awards after Rock took a jibe at Smith's wife actor Jada Pinkett Smith

On Sunday, March 12, Hollywood will celebrate its biggest night with the Oscars — a ceremony that is simultaneously both a celebration of the art of film-making, and a congratulatory pat-on-the-back for industry insiders. It’s a night of heartfelt speeches, glamorous dresses, and swag bags costing north of $100,000. In spite of the carefully choreographed nature of the event, there are always a few spontaneous moments, both good and bad. Last year’s ceremony was rocked (no pun intended) by The Slap, but the Oscars stage is no stranger to scandals. Here are some of the Academy’s most infamous moments.

Brando refuses the Oscar

The first big scandal of the modern televised Oscars happened in 1973 when Marlon Brando won Best Actor for Francis Ford Coppola’s mafia epic The Godfather (1972). Brando, who was already a bit of an eccentric by that time, did not attend the ceremony in protest against the portrayal of Native Americans in Hollywood. Instead he sent actress-activist Sacheen Littlefeather to refuse the award on his behalf and make a statement. She was booed off stage and mocked by Clint Eastwood who presented later that night. It took 50 years for the Academy to issue a formal apology to Littlefeather for their treatment of her.

Spike Lee’s 'Do The Right Thing' doesn’t get nominated for Best Picture

As long as awards have existed, there have been snubs. The biggest of them all was in 1990 when Spike Lee’s groundbreaking Do The Right Thing (1989) was not nominated for Best Picture. Instead that year, the Best Picture Oscar was won by another movie which also depicted race relations, but in a more benign and palatable way for white audiences — Driving Miss Daisy (1989). The snub was so egregious that Kim Basinger called it out from the Oscar stage while presenting another award that night saying, “We’ve got five great films here, and they’re great for one reason: They tell the truth. But there is one film missing from this list that deserves to be on it because, ironically, it might tell the biggest truth of all. And that’s Do the Right Thing.” Lee, arguably one of the greatest living American filmmakers, is still waiting on that Best Picture statuette.

#OscarsSoWhite

Cut to 2015, when April Reign saw the all-White list of acting nominees and fired off a tweet with a three-word hashtag that shames the Academy to this date: #OscarsSoWhite. While this generated some controversy that year, it wasn’t until the following year when no nominees of colour were nominated in acting categories again that the hashtag came roaring back.

A week later at an emergency board meeting, Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs announced a membership initiative that aimed to double the number of women and ethnically underrepresented members in four years. While the effects of that initiative have certainly been felt in the last few years, it’s still far from perfect — even this year, deserving movies like The Woman King and Till were completely shut out despite being favourites in multiple categories. As were Decision to Leave and Joyland in the Best International Feature Film category.

At the 2016 ceremony, host Chris Rock took some jabs at the Academy with #OscarsSoWhite, but he also made fun of some of the black film fraternity who had called for a boycott. Most notably, he joked that Jada Pinkett-Smith couldn’t really "boycott" the ceremony since she wasn’t invited in the first place. In hindsight, this joke was probably the first step towards The Slap.

'Moonlight'/'La La Land' Envelopegate

“There’s been a mistake. Moonlight — you guys won Best Picture.” With these words, La La Land (2016) producer Jordan Horowitz ended his brief but action-packed tenure as an Oscar winner. Ah, the glory days of 2017 when the most shocking thing that could happen on the Oscars stage was announcing the wrong winner for the biggest award of the night. How naive we were back then!

The Slap

There’s not much to say about The Slap that hasn’t already been said. Experts have dissected Chris Rock’s joke, Will Smith’s mental state, and the inner workings of the Pinkett-Smith marriage, in failed attempts to understand what happened. But one thing is clear — at every stage, the Academy’s response was too little, too late. In the words of Academy President Janet Yang, their response to the incident was "inadequate".
This year, the Academy has instituted a "crisis team" to handle any untoward events. It's difficult to imagine that the presence of a crisis team could have prevented The Slap, but they could at least act swiftly to address the fallout and manage the perception. And, in Hollywood, that’s all that matters. In the meantime, they’ve recruited Envelopegate survivor Jimmy Kimmel to be the "unflappable and unslappable" host of the 2023 Academy Awards.