Host Kimmel invites another Oscars goof
Show’s producers might have a little fun with last year’s best-picture gaffe
Jimmy Kimmel is ready for his second stint hosting the Oscars Sunday on ABC (8 ET/5 PT), and he hopes for a repeat performance of last year’s Envelopegate, in which Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced the wrong film as best picture.
Despite painstaking efforts by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and its accountant to avoid another debacle, “I want it to happen again,” Kimmel jokes in an interview. Especially because no one blamed him for it, “nor should they have.”
But Beatty appears in a playful new promo with Kimmel, raising the question of whether producers will have a little fun with the notorious gaffe on Sunday’s live broadcast. Is Beatty booked to return? “I do not know,” Kimmel claims, suspiciously. “It’s outside of my area of responsibility.”
Kimmel won’t say much, but he volunteers which of the best-picture nominees is the ripest for joke material. Leading contender “The Shape of
Water is about a woman who has sex with a sea monster. So probably that one — that’s got to be right at the top. That’s something we haven’t seen in the movies before, certainly not in an Oscar-nominated movie. I haven’t done the research, but I’m pretty sure that’s true.”
He says he has watched all of the nominated films, “and I hope that the
“I want it to happen again,” Sunday’s Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel jokes.
audience has also watched them.” But last year, he felt he’d seen “a lot more of the movies than the crowd at the Oscars,” and “it’s hard to do a joke if people don’t know what the reference is.”
And if the Hollywood crowd hasn’t seen them, does a field of contenders with few box office hits bode poorly for Oscars ratings? The show sunk to a near-record low 32.9 million viewers last year. “I worry about my ratings,” he says.
Since his last Oscars stint, Kimmel made headlines speaking out emotionally about the health care debate as his son, Billy, went through surgeries to correct a birth defect.
In essence, he became the political conscience of a generation. “That is a label that I did not give myself, nor do I agree with it,” he says. “But it feels weird. It’s not really gratifying. I wish I didn’t have to talk about any of this stuff,” even if “it does make me feel good to hear people say thank you for speaking about this. I hope it actually is having some positive impact.”
Kimmel is also not the first awardsshow host to tackle the Me Too moment, but he’ll “approach it as I approach every subject, with a tremendous amount of class and dignity,” he says, laughing. “It will definitely be part of the show. How big a part I’m not sure, because I’m still digging through a mound of material.”
But does he worry about blowback, tackling a touchy subject while hosting what’s typically the largest TV event outside the Super Bowl?
“Everything everyone says gets attacked at all times. This is our new reality,” he says. “I see a future of great silence.” Otherwise, “you carry on, and you have to realize what sometimes seems like an uproar is really four people tweeting. You also have to acknowledge that almost every subject is going to upset someone.”
And Kimmel won’t commit to repeating as host — if he’s asked.
“I’m going to focus on this year, and we’ll see what happens after that,” he says. “What you really want is to get to the point where you’re just taken for granted and resented.”