Will Smith is welcome to have an engraved name plate added to his Best Actor Oscar statuette, said Janet Yang, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, despite being banned from Academy events for a decade after slapping Chris Rock during last year’s ceremony.
Last month, Smith He vlogs a video on TikTok which instructed viewers to pick up an object and ask what they thought of themselves. A woman in the initial video claimed, “You will get an answer in your mind from your intuition.”
Smith proceeded to raise the Oscar statuette he had won for his performance King Richardwhich clearly indicates that the award has not been engraved.
Oscar winners usually attend the Governors Ball after the ceremony and there they will have their name plate added to the trophy. But Smith didn’t make it to the ball last year – after slapping Rock on stage during the awards ceremony – and has since been banned from Oscar and Academy events for the next 10 years.
During the last episode of Hollywood Reporter‘s Gossip Awards podcast, Yang said THRScott Feinberg says she thinks Smith should have his name engraved on the Oscars when asked what she would say if the actor reached out to get his name plate.
“He’s got the Oscar,” she continued in the interview, which was released a day before the 95th Academy Awards. “It should have his name engraved on it. I don’t know if it should come in person. But yeah, we can arrange.”
When explaining what happened in her head while watching the comedian’s slam dunk, Yang said, “Really, we were numb.”
Like everyone else, at first when Will walks on stage, we’re like, ‘Oh, that’s funny. He’d pretend he slapped him, and then Chris would act dumbfounded.” And then he was like, “Okay, it’s over.” Then he went back to his seat and then started screaming — at which point, of course, everyone said, “Oh my God, this is real.”
Yang said that before she joined the board and Academy CEO Bill Kramer, Rock was apparently asked about hosting again and declined. Rock addressed the slapping incident last week during his new comedy show, Chris Rock: Eclectic Rage, which was broadcast live on Netflix.
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