‘The Incident’ which took place between Chris Rock and Will Smith at the 2022 Oscars was a double-edged sword. It brought a bored audience back; between 2014 and 2020, the televised Academy Awards lost almost half their viewers, while in 2023 they were up by 18 million as eager punters tuned in hoping to see a bitch-fight between Olivia Colman and Nicole Kidman. But a couple of years without a dust-up will no doubt make a re-bored audience turn its collective back once more – and judging from last night’s astonishingly enervated showing they’d be totally justified.
The best bit is when the cameras pan in on the hopefuls and we see the rictus grins
Jonathan Ross featured in the cavalcade this year when he presented a ‘companion show’ for we lucky Brits. Ross confirmed the worst when he sniffed of the hosting of the actual Oscars: ‘You don’t want it to be totally anodyne and bland but you don’t want to go full Ricky Gervais and have the actors sitting there panicking thinking ‘What are they going to say about me?’’.
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