Back in 2022, Will Smith got up on stage during the Oscars telecast to slap host Chris Rock for making a joke about his wife's hair. "Keep my wife's name out of your f***ing mouth" he yelled. Smith, it should be noted, also won the Oscar for Best Actor that night. Almost immediately, however, pundits took to their keyboards to discuss the consequences for Smith, weighing in on any possible punishments or exoneration of his brash behavior. Smith, some might say wisely, resigned from the Motion Picture Academy of his own volition and was subsequently banned from the Academy Awards for 10 years. By late 2024, this all seemed like a tempest in a teapot.

But Smith's resignation from the Academy brought up a few interesting pieces of trivia about Hollywood, notably that the Academy has only very, very rarely expelled its members. Indeed, as noted by the Independent, only the most grievous criminals have actually been kicked out. Harvey Weinstein, for example, was given the boot in 2017 after the news broke of his many sexual crimes, followed by Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski in 2018 for the same reason. Cinematographer Adam Kimmel was also expelled in 2021 when the Academy learned he was a registered sex offender.

The first person to be booted from the Academy, however, was no criminal. Indeed, his "crimes" against the Academy seem so piddling and quotidian that one might wonder why the motion picture body targeted him. Back in 2004, actor Carmine Caridi, who played Carmine Rosato in "The Godfather Part II" and Albert Volpe in "The Godfather Part III," was expelled from the Academy for, of all things, sending copies of his VHS Academy screeners to a friend.