I had a similar reaction when I first heard about it "probably a sketch, staged" and I think it's good to be skeptic of stuff at first, but after watching the clip and thinking about it for a second, I highly doubt it was staged, just wouldn't make any sense.
First you're assuming the academy thought "oh yeah let's stage a violent interaction to make us more relevant". Besides putting them in the news cycle for a week, this achieves nothing to make them more relevant, if that's their plan, it's just dumb af, makes zero sense.
But fine let's say the academy is dumb and came up with this master plan, then you're assuming they somehow managed to convince Will fucking Smith who is worth hundreds of millions of dollars to throw his public image under the bus for them, okay... Clearly they couldn't come up with enough money to convince him, so what, they offered an oscar win and that was enough for him to look like an absolute moron in front of the world? I highly doubt it but let's keep going.
Then you do realize there is a team of CPAs certifying votes an everything, it's not one guy in a shack doing whatever he wants, so I assume you think they paid everyone involved in that process so he could get his oscar, and you think they'd be confident for people to keep their mouths shut forever too?
Like how is the risk worth the reward here? If this comes out they lose all credibility and the currently very successful people involved in that scheme would be ostracized from Hollywood. So they risk losing their careers/reputation for having the oscars in the news cycle for another week? The risk/reward just doesn't make any sense, they have everything to lose, very little to gain.
None of that makes any sense dude, and while I guess anything is possible I'd put the odds of it being staged at
