Piers Morgan says Hollywood has no business condemning Will Smith for his Oscars slap, saying the response exposed a gross hypocrisy. Photo / Getty Images
Piers Morgan says Hollywood has no business condemning Will Smith for his Oscars slap, saying the response exposed a gross hypocrisy. Photo / Getty Images
Opinion:
"Hollywood," said Marilyn Monroe, "is a place where they pay you $1000 for a kiss but 50 cents for your soul."
There are few better illustrations of Tinsel Town's warped morality than the shocking case of acclaimed film director Roman Polanski who was 44 when he drugged and rapeda 13-year-old girl.
He admitted unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor but before he received his full sentence, he fled America in 1978 and has never returned to face justice for his despicable crime.
Now, given Hollywood's current fit of faux-indignant moral rage over Will Smith's slap to Chris Rock's face, and its frantic effort to cancel him off the face of the acting planet, you might assume that it reacted with far greater fury and disgust to someone who abused and sodomised a young girl after plying her with Quaaludes.
But you would be wrong.
Instead, Hollywood carried on hiring Polanski to direct movies from his European exile, and in 2003, it awarded him the Oscar for Best Director at the Academy Awards for his work on The Pianist.
Of course, he wasn't there to receive it in person, or he would have been arrested and sent to prison to serve his sentence.
Instead, his friend Harrison Ford announced Polanski's victory, without explaining why he wasn't there, and said: "The Academy congratulates Roman Polanski and accepts this award on his behalf."
(Ford later presented the Oscar in person to a thrilled Polanski at his French home.)
Will Smith, right, hits presenter Chris Rock on stage while presenting the award for best documentary feature at the Oscars. Photo / AP
And with that, the star-studded audience burst into spontaneous cheering and applause, then many leapt to their feet to give the fugitive paedophile a prolonged standing ovation.
They included a wildly excited Meryl Streep, a beaming Martin Scorsese and a whistling Jack Nicholson — at whose house Polanski's sickening rape had taken place, while Nicholson was away.
Since then, he's continued making movies and stars like Sigourney Weaver, Johnny Depp, Jodie Foster, Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan and Kate Winslet have all happily worked with him.
In 2009, when Polanski was arrested in Switzerland on a warrant for his 1977 crime, more than 100 people in the Hollywood film industry including Woody Allen, David Lynch and Jonathan Demme signed a petition demanding his immediate release.
Astonishingly, Polanski remained a member of the Academy until 2018, when public pressure sparked by the #MeToo campaign finally forced Hollywood to pretend it had morals.
Director Roman Polanski fled the country in 1978 after being accused of drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl. Photo / Getty Images
Until then, the board of governors — many of whom are now expressing their horror at The Slap — saw no reason to remove him from its membership which is hardly surprising when you learn that among their number is Whoopi Goldberg who said of Polanski's conviction: "I know it wasn't rape-rape. It was something else."
So, spare me Hollywood's sudden moral seizure over Will Smith slapping a guy for mocking his wife Jada Pinkett Smith.
You don't have to condone the violence, which I don't, to understand why he suddenly lost his head when he thought (wrongly) that Rock was deliberately taunting the woman he loves over her distressing alopecia hair loss condition.
Smith, who had until then had enjoyed a magnificently unblemished career as one of the industry's nice guys, has since shown genuine regret and contrition for his overemotional actions, but that's not cutting any ice with his peer group who are howling for him to be professionally burned at the stake.
And frankly, there is nothing more nauseating than watching Hollywood now work itself into a lather of plastic offence when you consider how its immediate reaction to what happened was to hand Smith the Best Oscar award half an hour later and give him a noisy Polanski-like standing ovation.
It was only when it was pointed out that this seemed like rank hypocrisy from a community that constantly seeks to take the moral high ground on the "inappropriate" behaviour of people like Donald Trump, that Hollywood swung into full condemnation and cancel mode.
Apparently, it wasn't enough that Smith resigned from the Academy himself just days after the incident, nor that he's issued several grovelling apologies to Rock himself, who didn't know about Jada's alopecia and was therefore an innocent victim of the ugly episode who deserves great credit for keeping his cool.
Smith later apologised and resigned from the Academy. Photo / Getty Images
There's now a concerted effort to destroy Smith's career, with companies like Netflix and Apple reportedly moving fast to distance themselves from the troubled star — it's particularly ironic that none of the woke brigade seems to give a damn about his obvious mental health issues — by putting projects they have with him "on the back burner."
But Hollywood can't fool me with this absurdly disingenuous sudden outbreak of faux ethical concern.
Woody Allen ran off with and later married his wife Mia Farrow's adopted daughter Soon-Yi and was then accused of repeatedly sexually abusing his own adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, when she was just 7 years old.
He still works in Hollywood.
Mel Gibson beat up his girlfriend and told her, "You look like a f***ing pig in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of n******, it will be your fault." On another occasion, he said: "F***ing Jews … The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."
Hollywood has allowed people like convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein to work for years. Photo / Getty Images
Harvey Weinstein won an Oscar — and his company won 81 of them — but hasn't had it rescinded since his exposure as a vile sexual predator.
And so unedifyingly on ...
The truth is that Hollywood wouldn't know morality if it was slapped around its collective two faces.
As we've seen with Disney pretending to care about LGBT rights in Florida, while streaming content to countries where homosexuality is illegal, its only real concern is money and laughable virtue-signalling.
That's why the campaign to cancel Will Smith is so pathetic.
If Hollywood wants to cancel anyone for failing to meet its moral standard, it should start with itself.
