What I’m Hearing: Will’s Enablers

Welcome back to What I’m Hearing...

Happy Thursday, and a friendly reminder: tomorrow is April Fool’s Day.

Speaking of fools, my Oscar viewership prediction (14.5 million) proved too low, as did the guesses of hundreds of Hollywood professionals who entered the WIH reader contest. Our winner is… Deven Damji, a student at Northwestern University, who guessed 16.4 million viewers, just under the actual total of 16.6 million. Congrats to Deven, who will be taking all of our jobs shortly!

Sponsored by WWE’s WrestleMania this Saturday, April 2 and Sunday, April 3 on Peacock

Thursday Thoughts…

Looks like Alex Wagner is now the internal frontrunner to score the Rachel Maddow 9 p.m. slot on MSNBC, per a top source. Caveat: It’s far from final. Wagner used to have a noontime show on the network, and she returned in February, right around the time that Maddow announced she’s scaling back. Wagner is great on Showtime’s The Circus, but those are big (ratings) shoes to fill.
And speaking of live TV: you might want to tune in to the network late night shows tomorrow night; I heard what’s happening and it’s pretty cool. (No spoilers!)
Sad irony alert: Disney C.E.O. Bob Chapek tried (and failed) to move the company’s politics from left to center because he presumably thought it was better for business. Now, after his flip-flop on Don’t Say Gay, #BoycottDisney has been trending on Twitter, Fox News mentioned Disney 250 times in 24 hours, and Florida Republicans may attempt to revoke the company’s self-governance charter that it has enjoyed since 1967. Yikes.
The Peter Rice calculus seems to have changed lately. The Disney TV chief had been rumored to be interested in the No. 2 job under David Zaslav at the merged Warner Bros. Discovery. But with Chapek on the ropes at Disney, he may want to stick around and vie for the No. 1 job, if (or when?) it becomes available. Of course, Rice has told friends he’s happy where he is at Disney and has no plans to leave. That guy holds his cards very close to the embroidered Mickey vest.

I promised myself I wouldn’t write about the Oscars again, but the Academy always seems to make a bad situation worse, so…

Will Smith Forgot to Thank His Many Enablers

Did Oscars execs really ask Smith to leave? Inside the wild, emergency board of governors meeting in the aftermath of the slap fiasco—and who’s ultimately to blame.

MATTHEW BELLONI

In conversation after conversation with Academy members this week, everything keeps coming back to one word. Well, one word besides grotesque and embarrassing. It’s enablement.

Remember the #MeToo movement? It wasn’t just the rapists and harassers, we all proclaimed, it was the enablers—everyone around them, who saw objectively wrong behavior and did nothing. That all changed in 2017, we declared. No more rewarding bad actors or turning a blind eye. Except it wasn’t true, of course. The obvious abusers were purged, but enablement thrives in this town, and enablement just bit the motion picture Academy in the ass.

So let’s not start at Sunday’s Oscars debasement, where a movie star who has been coddled for more than 30 years decided he could hijack the show and attack a fellow performer, then pretend nothing happened, and receive hugs from his peers, and make it all better with a speech that invoked his co-stars and family to justify the behavior—and generate a standing ovation from many of the enablers (er, attendees) in the audience.

No, let’s cut right to yesterday’s emergency board of governors meeting. It was wild, according to two people I spoke to who were on the call...

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