After months as a source of drama and mockery, the 2019 Oscars turned out pretty well. Sure, there were, shall we say, issues with certain winners, but it moved briskly and it even saw an uptick in ratings. One reason for the former, and maybe even the latter: No host. Indeed, the man who served as emcee for the previous two ceremonies, one Jimmy Kimmel, had to do his late night show the night after the Oscars, on the same network and across the street from where the Dolby Theater. And he couldn’t not make some self-deprecating jokes.
Deadline got the scoop before the episode in question hit the airwaves, reporting that the host of Jimmy Kimmel Live! cracked that he watched the Oscars in “full hair and makeup – just in case someone called at the last second and said, ‘Hey, listen, we needed ya.’ But they didn’t.”
Kimmel hosted the 2017 and 2018 Oscars; the first was the one that ended infamously, with presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announcing the wrong Best Picture winner. He acknowledged that perhaps last night’s broadcast suggests he and people like him might be superfluous.
“There was no official host this year, and the show was 36 minutes shorter than last year. Which people like, I guess,” Kimmel said. He joked that maybe they should keep trimming “until it is exactly one minute long. And the ratings will be huge.”
Maybe award show host is an endangered job. “I tried pitching having no host for this show tonight, but ABC didn’t go for it,” Kimmel quipped. “But I’ll tell you, this is some network. We had an Oscars without a host and a Bachelor that won’t have sex with anybody,”
Kimmel, as is his wont these days, also took a swipe at our president, specifically his tweet attacking Spike Lee’s speech, which he called “racist.” The host singled out Trump’s claim that he’s “done more for African Americans…than almost any other Pres [sic].”
“He’s like, ‘You know if it weren’t for that damn Lincoln, I’d be number one!’” Kimmel joked. He said that the fact that Trump fired off a tweet about the now-Oscar-winning filmmaker right before leaving for a de-nuclearization summit with North Korea “is kinda all you need to know about how his mind works.” He added, “He was thinking about Spike Lee.”
(Via Deadline)
