IT WAS THE slap that echoed around the world when actor Will Smith smacked comedian Chris Rock on stage at this year’s Oscars.
The altercation came after ceremony host Rock made a joke about Smith’s wife’s shaved head.
Jada Pickett Smith has previously spoken about the difficulties living with alopecia, a condition that causes hair loss.
The rest of the show went on with Smith winning an Oscar but the hit dominated headlines, inspiring media discussion on whether the actor was in the wrong.
On social media, the slap launched countless memes as stills from the incident went viral.
A photo collage of actors including Charlize Theron, Mel Gibson, Meryl Streep and Salma Hayek looking shocked and ‘reacting’ to the slap spread across Twitter and Facebook.
One tweet alone garnered 383,000 likes and 75,000 retweets after posting the photo under the caption “Everyone at the Oscar’s when Will Smith assaulted Chris Rock on national television #Oscars”
On Facebook, two established radio stations in New Jersey and Malaysia also posted the photo, claiming it was celebrities reacting to the hit.
But is it?
Many of the celebrities featured in this photo weren’t nominated for awards this year or weren’t pictured on the red carpet entering the event.
Emma Stone, shown in the collage, was publicly noted for not attending the 2022 Oscars.
Going off the outfits, Charlize Theron famously wore those distinctive Chopard 60 carat diamond earrings in 2017.
She is also pictured in the collage wearing the same straps of her Dior Haute Couture Dress, which she also wore in 2017.
Stone, Theron and Gibson all attended the 2017 Oscars where the wrong winner was famously read out for the Best Picture award.
This photo of celebrities reacting to the news that Moonlight, not La La Land won best picture shows the same famous faces in the same clothes as this year’s ‘reaction’ collage.
It seems the isolated reactions of Michelle Williams, Busy Phillips, the Rock and Matt Damon are all taken from the same photo of the 2017 ceremony.
Watch the moment when "La La Land" is mistakenly announced best picture winner https://t.co/h3WScQsfxB pic.twitter.com/5QzqnwfwRv
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) February 27, 2017
The photo is not of celebrities reacting to Will Smith’s 2022 Oscar slap. Instead, it’s of the show biz reactions to the 2017 ‘wrong name in the envelope’ Oscar scandal. This photo is DEBUNKED.
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