 Welcome back to What I’m Hearing...
Coming at you mid-Grammys, which we’ll be breaking down on tomorrow’s episode of The Town podcast, with Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw, from Vegas. Speaking of the pod, if you’re not subscribed, you missed last week’s wild Oscars coverage, plus my interview with WWE president Nick Khan, and an emergency pod on Friday about the Will Smith resignation. Subscribe here.
Discussed in today’s email: Barry Diller, Meredith O’Sullivan Wasson, Bad Bunny, Ted Sarandos, Ava Duvernay, Denzel Washington, Dawn Hudson, Bob Chapek, Will Packer, Ari Emanuel, and who’s had it worse, AT&T or the Oscars?
But first…
Who Won the Week
It’s Chris Rock, of course, but the real flex here would be for Rock to write an hour of stand-up on The Slap, secretly perform it during an off night of his current tour, film the show, then auction it off. What streamer wouldn’t pay $20 million for that, and who wouldn’t watch it?
 What I’m hearing about the post-slap resignation, the Will Packer fallout, what happens to Smith’s projects, the race issue, and the Scientology question.
As Jerrod Carmichael noted in his great SNL monologue last night, it’s kinda hard to believe that The Slap was just a week ago. It feels like a different era. Since I’ve now written two long missives on this subject, today I’m emptying my notebook with some brief news and notes…
The upshot: The thinking seems to be that Smith was smart to resign on Friday from the Academy before he could be kicked out or suspended. I agree. After all, it’s mostly a symbolic move, and he needs a lot of symbolism to help claw back his career—the thing he actually cares about. But the Academy should also be smart and go further, revoking Oscar nomination and attendance privileges, certainly for a year and possibly longer. We’ll see what happens on April 18th.
How the decision went down: There was a big debate among Smith’s team over whether to resign, I’m told. At first, Team Will—CAA’s Richard Lovett, manager Miguel Melendez, and publicist Meredith O’Sullivan Wasson, as well as business partners James Lassiter and Ko Yada, wife Jada Pinkett Smith and others—weren’t sure the Academy would do anything substantive. But once they took the town’s temperature, their tune changed. For instance, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos—who counts comedians among his best friends and actually hosted a dinner party with Rock, Adam Sandler and David Spade earlier this year—was among the influential voices telling people he wanted Smith out. The idea to resign actually came from Smith himself, I’m told. Lovett was initially opposed, according to two sources. But once the team realized a suspension or expulsion was coming, Lovett ultimately endorsed the strategy...
FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT  Inside the wild, emergency board of governors meeting in the aftermath of the slap fiasco—and who’s ultimately to blame. MATTHEW BELLONI  Some Russians are now refusing to accept anything less than total victory. Has Putin become a prisoner of his own propaganda? JULIA IOFFE  Is there life after the 45th president? Some companies are articulating a new path; others, not so much. DYLAN BYERS  In our age of AMC apefests, social media influence is becoming the people’s leverage in the world of professional finance. WILLIAM D. COHAN
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