Oscars 2022: Did Will Smith just punch Chris Rock?

Did we just see an Oscars 2022 moment that we never expected between Will Smith and Chris Rock? It sure seems that way. As a matter of fact, we’re still reeling from it.

Ultimately, we’ve seen in the past hosts and presenters take jabs at some people in the audience — but we’re talking about metaphorical ones. Tonight, Will Smith took a literal jab at Rock after a joke he made about his wife Jada Pinkett-Smith. He did not like it, came on stage, and appeared to then strike him. (We’d say it was more of a slap than a full-fledged punch.) At that point, the entire audience was stunned and Rock was clearly shaken. That is not something that you see happen all that often. Chris even stumbled with some of his words after the fact.

Here’s the big question here: Was all of this a bit? A joke? Pre-planned, or legit? The audience response wasn’t such that it felt like it was planned out in advance. We know that there was a part of this where we ended up seeing Smith be bleeped-out, and that raises questions on its own. It seemed like he said some variation of “keep my wife’s name out of your mouth.” (You can watch the censored quote below from Variety.) The Australian broadcast actually aired an uncensored version where the comments were actually picked up.

The show tried to move on from this quickly and continued as though nothing else happened, which is probably the right move, all things considered. Yet, it did create a lot of awkwardness when it comes to Will being a potential winner later. What would he say in his speech? Well, we suppose we could figured that out later, as he’s a favorite to win for King Richard.

The truth of the matter here is that this is probably going to be one of the most memorable moments of Oscars history. We said before the show that these are often unplanned, but we’re not exactly sure that many of them go quite like this.

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What did you think the Chris Rock – Will Smith moment during the 2022 Oscars?

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