Oscars 2022 Review: 7 Ups & 8 Downs
The slap heard around the world derails a messy, bloated Oscars.
This year's Academy Awards was primed to be a return to glitzy best for a show that, due to pandemic-related restrictions, took place in scaled-back form in a train station last year.
Aside from a few potentially chaotic spoilers in the Best Actress and Best Picture fields, it was set to be a safely predictable Oscars that spread the wealth around many worthy films, and on paper that's largely what happened.
But this year's show will ultimately be defined by one thing and one thing only: Will Smith slapping Chris Rock in the face for making an insensitive joke about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.
It's a moment that stopped the 2022 Oscars dead in their tracks and has dominated social media and the news ever since.
It isn't without irony that the Academy desperately attempted to re-engineer this year's show to recover its declining ratings, and such a moment of genuinely unscripted drama ultimately got more people talking about the Oscars than in many years.
But it also cast a dark pall over the rest of the ceremony and distracted massively from the many great films and artists picking up awards. It certainly wasn't the worst Oscars ever in terms of awards doled out, but it sure was the messiest.
And so first, here's what this year's Academy Awards got wrong...