The president of the Academy Awards admitted that the response to the Will Smith slap incident was not approached properly by the organization
A year has passed since the situation at the Oscars in which actor Will Smith took the stage to slap Chris Rock for a crude joke aimed at actress and Smith's wife Jada Pinkett-Smith. Smith would later accept his first Best Actor Award for his role in the sport biopic "King Richard", and days after the event he would announce his resignation from the Academy as well as offer his apologies for the act. Now weeks before the 2023 Oscars, Academy president Janet Yang admitted that the incident was not handled with care.
According to Variety (http://bitly.ws/AvVf), Yang stated at a luncheon for Oscar nominees that "What happened onstage was fully unacceptable and the response from our organization was inadequate...We learned from this that the Academy must be fully transparent and accountable in our actions, and particularly in times of crisis, you must act swiftly, compassionately, and decisively for ourselves and for our industry."
Will Smith had been absent from the public eye in the months following "the slap", emerging once again to promote the film AppleTV+ film "Emancipation", in which he has the lead role. Recently, news broke that Smith and fellow actor Michael B. Jordan will be starring in a sequel to Smith's 2007 "I Am Legend" film, with no release-date announced yet.
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