Where There’s a Will

The discussion about That Oscars Slap (Google it if you’ve been living in a hole for the past 10 days) goes on, with Will Smith resigning from the Academy for what was, legally, battery (and, in some US states would be classed as assault), and his agents now divided as to whether they should dump him. 

It remains to be seen whether his Oscar will be taken away, although if Harvey Weinstein managed to hold on to his awards, it’s hard to see how they can justify taking away Smith’s. 

I don’t for a second condone what Smith did, but Hollywood is a nest of vipers, double standards, and a breeding ground for hypocrisy of many kinds. Yes, he deserves to be punished in some way, but he won the Oscar for his work; a moment of madness does not and should not take away from what he has given us as an actor.  

I’m not buying his excuse that he’s a “work in progress, though” – the default position everyone in Hollywood resorts to when they screw up; it has more than a hint of Catholicism about it – if you repent, your sins will be forgiven (very handy, given what we know about the Catholic clergy). 

We’re all works in progress from the second we’re born until the day we die; most of us don’t progress to whacking someone around the face when they say something we don’t like. That’s not a work in progress; it’s a work in regression. 

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Good luck to would-be photographer Brooklyn Beckham and actor Nicola Peltz for their forthcoming nuptials in a tent in Florida on Saturday. Well, I say “tent”; we’re not talking a tipi here.  

Call me an old softie, but they seem to me to be a young couple very much in love, yet despite that have apparently drawn up the mother of all pre-nups. Her family is a lot richer than his, so I suspect Daddy has his fingerprints all over her paperwork. 

Still, I hope they’ll be very happy, and the best thing about Brooklyn being the groom? He won’t be taking the pics. For that, we can all be grateful. 

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Meghan Markle has submitted an application to the US Patent and Trademark Office to copyright the centuries old English word “archetypes” for use on her Spotify podcasts. Do she and Harry have any real work to do other than employ lawyers to make them try to seem relevant? How long before the verb “to markle” enters the dictionary: an attempt to inflate one’s own self-importance and lecture the world from a Californian mansion. I think I’ll copyright that.