This year’s Oscar nominations were announced on Tuesday. Hooray for Judd Hirsch on his second-ever nom! Can you believe RRR only got one for Best Original Song? The big show isn’t until March 12, but the 95-year-old ceremony — which hasn’t had strong cultural relevance in a good while — is getting some attention this year thanks to an incident that happened last year. You know what we’re talking about: that slap. Will something like it happen again this year? We’re a month and a half from finding out, but already host Jimmy Kimmel is making nervous jokes about it.
On Tuesday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the comic talked about some of the betting that’s been going on for who will win this year. Odds are that Everything Everywhere All at Once will trounce the likes of Tár and Elvis. Brendan Fraser in The Whale has the edge over Colin Farrell in The Banshees of Inisherin. But there’s another category of betting that caught Kimmel’s eye: one entitled “Will any host or award presenter be slapped during the show?”
Right now someone who bets $100 on “yes” will win $1200. That unnerved Kimmel a bit, and he joked “seems like they’re encouraging someone with a gambling problem to slap me.”
Kimmel wasn’t the only late-night host to make Will Smith Oscars slap jokes. Wanda Sykes, currently sitting in as a temporary Daily Show host, cracked, “If you’re wondering how they picked the nominees this year, they basically just went, ‘Hmm, let’s see, who’s not going to slap nobody?’”
Kimmel also joked about a category that rarely gets much attention: Best Animated Short. During the nomination announcements, presenter Riz Ahmed went viral when he read the name of one of the nominees, a little film called My Year of Dicks.
Kimmel admitted he’d never heard of that one, adding, “I went to look up My Year of Dicks, and now my computer won’t turn on.”
You can watch Kimmel’s monologue in the video above. The bit about the slap category begins around the 1:30 mark.
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)
