“Have any of you here ever hosted the Oscars before? Well, except for the end – It was a lot of fun,” Jimmy Kimmel said at the top of his ABC late-night show.
“As I’m sure you’ve at least heard, La La Land was simultaneously the biggest winner and loser last night…You know it’s a strange night when the word ‘envelope’ is trending on Twitter.”
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Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway presented the award for Best Picture, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Bonnie and Clyde. “So they come out, with the envelope. And, here’s where the story starts,” Kimmel says.
Beatty was confused by what he saw on the card, Kimmel explained, “so he let her read the winner. In other words, Clyde threw Bonnie under the bus. Which, I have to be honest, is one of the slickest moves I’ve ever seen.”
Dunaway then announces La La Land as Best Picture and as the producers get up on stage and speechify, Kimmel says, he was sitting in the audience.
“The plan is for me to end the show from the audience, next to Matt Damon. Who, make no mistake, whatever confusion there was about who won, Matt Damon lost. He was a loser. He is a loser,” Kimmel explains. “But we’re sitting there, and we notice some commotion going on.”
“And Matt says, ‘I think I heard the stage manager say they got the winner wrong.’ Which is unusual. But you figure the host will go onstage and clear this up. And then I remember, ‘Oh I’m the host’,” Kimmel jokes.
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Hours before Kimmel’s late-show broadcast, the accountants for the awards competition accepted responsibility for having handed Beatty the wrong envelope, and apologized. And what of his co-presenter, Faye Dunaway, who had actually read the name of the wrong movie?
“She made quite a getaway,” Kimmel joked. “She read the wrong name and split. She got the hell out of there.”
But this was not the only problem to plague this year’s Academy Awards, Kimmel revealed. During rehearsal on Sunday, a huge part of the set collapsed. “I was on stage – I stepped of stage – and about a minute later, they both came crashing down. It scared the crap out of everybody. A lot of people thought a bomb went off. My wife shoved our daughter under a table to protect her. Somehow – even though we had like five cameras going – no one got this on video.”
“Someone could easily have been crushed. Not me – I have reflexes like Spider Man,” Kimmel continued. “But, if there was a regular human on that stage, he would have been dead. So the envelope thing was a distant second in the disaster category,” Kimmel said putting things in perspective, adding, he “could have been the first person in history to both host and appear in the In Memoriam montage in the same show.”
And, speaking of the In Memoriam montage, Kimmel acknowledged there had been a snafu there too. “That woman there, who passed away – Janet Patterson? That’s not Janet Patterson. That’s a picture of a another producer named Jan Chapman, who is very much alive. They put a picture of a live person in the In Memoriam.”
“Technically, according to Academy Rules, we now have to kill her,” he joked. Watch the full monologue above.
