Janet Hubert, best known for playing Will Smith’s “Aunt Viv” on the sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, is blasting the actor and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, over the race controversy surrounding the 88th Academy Awards.
As Breitbart News reported on Monday, Pinkett Smith is not only calling for a boycott of the Oscars, but she is also calling for blacks to make a break from mainstream culture, after her husband was among a number of black actors the Academy left off this year’s ballot.
In a four-minute video posted online Monday night, Hubert laid into the famous couple, saying she believes Pinkett Smith’s indignation is motivated by Will Smith’s having been snubbed for his role in Concussion.
“First of all, Miss Thing,” Hubert begins, “does your man not have a mouth of his own with which to speak?” She adds:
The second thing, girlfriend, there’s a lot of s—t going on in the world that you all don’t seem to recognize. People are dying. Our boys are being shot left and right. People are starving. People are trying to pay bills. And you’re talking about some motherf—king actors and Oscars and It just ain’t that deep.
The 60-year-old continues:
And here’s the other thing: For you to ask other actors, and other black actresses and actors to jeopardize their career and their standing in a town that you know damn well you don’t do that. And here’s the other thing: They don’t care. They don’t care. And I find it ironic that somebody who has made their living, made their living and made millions and millions of dollars from the very people you’re talking about boycotting just because you didn’t get a nomination, just because you didn’t win. That is not the way life works, baby, okay?
“Here you are, you’ve had a few flops and you know there are those out there who really deserved a nod,” she asserts.
Taking a dig at Smith’s Nigerian accent in Concussion, which has been ridiculed online, Hubert says:
Maybe you didn’t deserve a nomination. I didn’t think, frankly, you deserved a Golden Globes nomination with that accent, but you got one. And just because the world doesn’t go the way you want it to go, doesn’t mean you can go out and start asking people to stand up and sing “We Shall Overcome” for you.
“You ain’t Barack and Michelle Obama,” she adds. “And you all need to get over yourselves. You have a huge production company that you only produce your friends, your family, and yourself. So you are a part of Hollywood, you are a part of the system that is unfair to other actors, so get real!”
Hubert concludes, “We got bigger s—t to worry about than the Oscars.”
Watch Hubert’s video below:
On her Twitter page on Saturday, Jada Pinkett Smith weighed in on this year’s #OscarsSoWhite controversy:
At the Oscars…people of color are always welcomed to give out awards…even entertain, (pt. 1)
— Jada Pinkett Smith (@jadapsmith) January 16, 2016
The following day, the actress posted a video on her Facebook page calling on the black community to “make programs for ourselves that acknowledge us in ways that we see fit that are just as good as the so-called mainstream ones.”
“I think that it’s our responsibility now to make the change,” she said. “Begging for acknowledgment or even asking diminishes dignity, and diminishes power, and we are a dignified people, and we are powerful, and let’s not forget it.”
Last Thursday, the Academy announced that for the second consecutive year, all 20 Oscar nominations in the four main acting categories had gone exclusively to white actors.