Oscar gaffe nixed Kimmel’s revenge
Revenge, they say, is sweet. But Jimmy Kimmel failed to get his sweet revenge when mayhem ensued onstage at the tail end of the 2017 Oscars.
Kimmel had been making fun of fake-enemy Matt Damon the entire Oscars show, which was telecast last Monday in the Philippines. He was supposed to end it with the perfect revenge, too, which was why he was sitting beside Damon just a few minutes before the show was supposed to wrap.
“The plan for the last joke was—the Best Picture winner is announced, they make a speech. I was assuming the Best Picture was not going to be Manchester by the Sea. I said to (Matt), ‘If it’s not
Manchester by the Sea I’m going to be sitting next to you, and it’s going to be my revenge for the Emmys,’” Kimmel shared in a podcast.
Damon was nominated as producer of Manchester by the Sea, which lost to La La Land for a couple of minutes but eventually lost to the real winner, Moonlight.
“I’d be sitting next to him, and it would start on me. I’d start wrapping the show up, but then the camera would widen and we’d see that Matt would be sitting next to me. I would say, ‘Well, you know, it’s unbelievable, you know Casey (Affleck) won (for Best Actor) and Kenneth (Lonergan) won (for Best Original Screenplay). There’s only one person who didn’t win tonight, and it’s you,’” Kimmel shared his joke.
“It would have been a nice little button to the whole night.”
But it wasn’t meant to be. Kimmel had to run up on stage to manage the situation since presenters Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty announced the wrong winner.
Last September, Kimmel also hosted the Emmys. At the same time, his show, Jimmy Kimmel
Live! was nominated for Outstanding Variety Talk Series but lost to Last Week Tonight With John Oliver.
After the category was presented, Damon casually walked onstage with an apple and called Kimmel a “big loser.”
The “feud” started in 2005. Kimmel, who was on the third season of his show, was feeling particularly low one episode. He told National Public Radio: “We had a bad show. … The guests were bad, and I was feeling pretty bad about myself at the end of the program. And I decided to say, for the amusement of one of our producers who was standing next to me… ‘I want to apologize to Matt Damon. We ran out of time.’ …And he got a kick out of it, the producer, so I just started doing it every night to amuse him.” Why Damon? “Matt Damon was just the first name that popped into my head. I was trying to think of an A-list star, and somebody we absolutely would not bump if he was on the show. …People laugh every time I say it. …Repeating the same joke every single night, you’d think eventually people would get tired of it, but they don’t,” Kimmel explained.