(CNN Spanish) — Will Smith is prohibited from attending the Oscars this year (and the next nine), but he is surely the first name the public thinks of during this Sunday’s ceremony in Hollywood.
After Chris Rock was slapped in the face at the 2022 awards, the fresh prince of Bel-Air faced ostracism: he resigned from the Academy and, a few days later, the organization announced that he was prohibited from attending any of its events, including the Oscars, for 10 years.
Almost 12 months later, the topic is still in vogue. The weekend before the 2023 Oscars, precisely, Chris Rock did a Netflix special in which he addressed the issue.
But it’s not the only thing people talk about him for: at least two film projects, the award-winning “Emancipation” and the sequel to “I Am Legend” in the works, have once again put Smith at the center of conversations related to his performances.
‘Emancipation’, Will Smith’s return to the awards
Smith returned to the award shows on March 1, when he was awarded the Beacon Award from the African American Film Critics Association for “Emancipation,” an award he received with director Antoine Fuqua.
“Emancipation’ was the single most difficult movie of my entire career,” said Smith, who played a slave named Peter in the AppleTV+ film. “It’s really hard to transport a modern mind to that time period. It’s hard to imagine that level of inhumanity,” added the Oscar winner.
Antoine Fuqua (left) and Will Smith accept the Beacon Award for “Emancipation.” (Credit: Jemal Countess/Getty Images)
The week before, Smith had won the best actor award at the NAACP Image Awards, which recognizes the achievements of people of color in arts, entertainment and culture, for this very film. However, he did not attend the event and instead posted a message on social media.
The sequel to “I Am Legend”
Will Smith’s name also returned to the spotlight with the announcement of a sequel to 2007’s “I Am Legend,” in which he will star opposite Michael B. Jordan.
Producer and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman spoke to the publication Deadline about the new film, which will be set “a few decades later than the first.”
“I’m obsessed with [la serie de HBO] ‘The Last of Us,’ where we see the world right after the apocalypse, but also after a lapse of 20-30 years,” he said. “You see the earth reclaim the world, and there’s something beautiful about the question of what occurs when the man is no longer the main tenant”.
For the sequel, Goldsman said they will go back “to Matheson’s original book, and to the alternate ending as opposed to the ending in the original movie.”
The original film was based on Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel of the same name, and an alternate ending exists on a special edition two-disc DVD. (Both “I Am Legend” and the sequel are projects of Warner Bros., which shares a parent company with CNN.)
In January, on the other hand, the actor announced that he would return with Martin Lawrence to a new installment of the “Bad Boys” franchise.
The actor’s messages about the slap
From the night of the Oscars in 2022 to date, Will Smith has addressed what happened at the ceremony on at least three occasions. One of the most recent was in dialogue with Trevor Noah on an episode of “The Daily Show” in November.
There, Smith said he lost his cool and called the event a “horrible night.”
“And I guess what I would say is you never know what someone’s going through,” Smith told Noah. “I was going through something that night. Not that that excuses my behavior at all,” he added.
The actor stated that the most painful thing for him was that his actions made it “difficult for other people”. “I got the idea that hurt people hurt people,” he said. “It was a rage that had been bottled up for a long time,” he said.
crisis team
Meanwhile, Academy CEO Bill Kramer said in an interview with Time that they will now have a crisis team available on Oscar night, to be able to deal with any situation like last year’s slap.
The incident came after Chris Rock made a joke about the shaved head of Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, who suffers from alopecia, an autoimmune condition that can cause hair loss.
With information from Chloe Melas, Lisa Respers France, Dean Obeidallah.
