How the Academy Awards became a conspiracy theory hotbed...
It may seem an unlikely place for a conspiracy theory to emerge, but one slap at the 94th Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday 28th March 2022, sparked a whole raft of them.
Will Smith struck presenter Chris Rock in reaction to a joke that Rock directed towards Will Smith’s wife Jada Pinkett Smith (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-60897004). It seemed to most people, whether they condoned the action or not, to be a spontaneous emotional reaction from Smith. However, the internet and social media still exploded with conspiracy theories about the incident.
Some people argued that the incident was an elaborate hoax, fabricated and carried out to increase the profile of the Academy Awards ceremony and re-establish it as a significant event following diminishing viewing figures over the last few years. People in this camp suggested that false arms, cheek padding and choreography were all visible in videos and images from the night – although there is, as yet, no verified evidence of any of this. It is also not clear what either party would gain from such a stunt. Both Smith and Rock are successful enough to be at the awards ceremony, one as a presenter the other as a subsequent winner – so neither would seem to need the publicity. And although the profile of the event has certainly been raised by the incident, it probably isn’t in the way the Academy would first choose to make this happen. Also, their reaction to the incident doesn’t immediately suggest a lot of forward planning on their part.
There were other more bizarre claims circulating online, ranging from the incident being designed so the public could receive subliminal vaccine propaganda, to the incident being a distraction from secret trials of high-profile politicians at Guantanamo Bay or even so a Hollywood elite paedophilic ring could share secret messages about child sex trafficking. There was even talk that the incident was an elaborate stunt designed to promote an alopecia medication recently developed by Pfizer, or that it was orchestrated to take attention away from the war in Ukraine.
There is unlikely to be a full account for the situation that unfolded at the Academy Awards. The most reasonable explanation is that one man momentarily lost control. But finding causal explanations for events of public importance is a crucial part of the human need to build a stable, accurate, and internally consistent understanding of the world. People will often seek to find answers when there is uncertainty, or in an attempt to explain random, unexpected events (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0963721417718261). People therefore often look to conspiracy theories to try to provide clarity in situations that shock them, or that they do not fully understand. The events that unfolded at the Academy Awards on 28th March 2022 has certainly been one of those situations.