Unfortunately, the only honest way to begin any discussion about the 94th Academy Awards is by addressing the slap.
Sunday’s ceremony took a stunning turn when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock across the face live on the Oscars stage after the comedian cracked a joke about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith’s alopecia. “CODA” ended up upsetting “The Power of the Dog” for best picture, but all anyone could talk about in the ABC telecast’s aftermath was the slap heard round the world.
The incident was the most prominent headline to come out of the 2022 Oscars, but there are plenty of storylines that are much more relevant to the annual telecast’s present and future. That’s why the Post-Gazette enlisted Marina Fang, a 28-year-old McCandless native and HuffPost senior culture reporter, to sift through the wreckage of this year’s Academy Awards.
Like most entertainment journalists, Fang grew up poring over every edition of Entertainment Weekly and treating the Oscars like the Super Bowl. She would often drag her parents to Squirrel Hill’s Manor Theatre to catch that year’s crop of movies and maintained detailed spreadsheets to give herself an edge in predicting the winners.
Fang always loved writing, but becoming a full-time journalist was an idea that “felt very abstract” to her, though she did appreciate growing up watching the success of Asian American broadcast journalists like Connie Chung, Lisa Ling and Ann Curry. She pursued her passions by competing on the debate team at North Allegheny High School and joining the student newspaper at the University of Chicago.
She was hired by HuffPost as a political reporter in 2015 right out of college. Fang was still an entertainment obsessive and began covering the 2016 presidential election from a cultural perspective. She eventually parlayed that experience into her current role as a senior culture reporter covering the intersection between popular culture and larger societal issues.
“I still think of myself as someone with one foot in politics and one foot in culture,” she said. “It’s really helpful. You can’t really cover one thing without the other, and I try to think of my coverage in that way.”
At this year’s Oscars, Fang felt the Academy put too much energy into attracting an “imagined viewer” who doesn’t watch the Oscars but might tune in if, say, Tony Hawk presented an award or the telecast shouted out a few popular 2021 films voted on by fans. Devoting so much time to fan-favorite films felt “frankly kind of soulless,” she said, “like something they cooked up with some kind of algorithm” to boost ratings.
“I will watch the Oscars no matter what,” she said. “I’ve watched them since I was a kid, and I think a lot of people who watch the Oscars year after year are those kind of people. ... The problem lies with this outsized emphasis on the ratings and trying to ‘save’ the ratings. That’s where so many of these decisions are coming from, and I think they come at the expense of the viewer.”
For Fang, it’s “ultimately these human moments” that resonate the most with viewers. She brought up the heartfelt acceptance speeches Troy Kotsur (“CODA”) and Ariana DeBose (“West Side Story”) gave after winning best supporting actor and actress as examples of spontaneous bursts of emotion that engender more goodwill than “some sort of mass-engineered show” ever could.
Another example was Questlove’s acceptance speech after “Summer of Soul” won best documentary — which Fang fears went largely unnoticed because it came directly after Smith’s altercation with Rock. She pointed to that viral incident as yet another testament to the power of the unplanned occurrence.
“In this weird twist, that moment reinforces that idea,” she said. “The moments that you can’t cook up are the moments people will remember, good or bad, heartwarming or stunning.”
Fang would love if more attention was paid to “CODA,” which was written and directed by Carnegie Mellon University graduate Sian Heder. “CODA” is only the third best picture winner ever to be directed by a woman, and Fang said the fact its story is centered on a young woman may signify a potential shift in how the Academy has traditionally viewed those sort of films.
“CODA” also made AppleTV+ the first streaming service to earn a best picture victory and is “historic for being a very overdue moment for deaf representation,” Fang said.
“There are so many ways that ‘CODA’ winning will help reshape what people think of as an Oscar movie, like ‘Moonlight’ and ‘Parasite’ have,” she said, referring to the 2017 and 2020 best picture winners.
Even though Fang has a national profile, she still gets a kick out of seeing her hometown represented in pop culture. She recently moderated a panel with the cast of the Pittsburgh-filmed Netflix series “The Chair” and giddily gabbed backstage with showrunner Amanda Peet and star Sandra Oh about their experiences in the Steel City.
“It’s really exciting to watch something and realize, oh, that person is from Pittsburgh, or that person went to CMU, or that production was shot there,” Fang said. “There are so many cool things happening, and entertainment and culture have put Pittsburgh on the map. People should be proud of that.”
Joshua Axelrod: jaxelrod@post-gazette.com and Twitter @jaxelburgh.
First Published: March 29, 2022, 10:00 a.m.
Updated: March 29, 2022, 10:06 a.m.