Jimmy Kimmel is back at the Oscars. The talk show host opened the 2024 Academy Awards on March 10 with a clever monologue, which began with a joke about the show’s earlier-than-usual start time. “We may be starting early but we’ll still end very, very late,” he quipped. “We’re already over by five minutes, and I’m not even joking.”
As usual, Kimmel then went into a series of jokes about this year’s most nominated films, starting with Barbie. First, he said Greta Gerwig should’ve been nominated for Best Director, eliciting applause from the crowd. “Don’t act like you had nothing to do with this,” he quipped.
Then, he gave a shout-out to stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, saying that no matter whether they win an Oscar tonight, they already won “the genetic lottery,” before nodding to Brokeback Mountain. “Ryan, you are so hot,” he quipped. “Let’s go camping together and not tell our wives.”
Kimmel then moved on to Oppenheimer, the most nominated film of the night, and its star Cillian Murphy. “Interesting fact about his name: when he does drama, it’s pronounced Cillian. When he does comedy, it’s pronounced silly-ann,” he joked.
When he got to Murphy’s co-star Robert Downey Jr., he made a dig at one of his past movies. “He played the villain in a movie where Tim Allen turns into a dog,” he mentioned, nodding to 2006’s The Shaggy Dog. He then suggested that if they wanted to remake the film, they should cast Messi, the dog from Anatomy of a Fall, who was sitting proudly in the audience.
Kimmel roasted pretty much every film in contention, from Emma Stone’s character in Poor Things to Martin Scorsese’s three-hour-long Killers of the Flower Moon. “When I saw Killers, I had my mail forwarded to the theater,” he joked.
But of course, he made sure to get a little more personal, even bringing up Bradley Cooper’s mother Gloria, who attended as her son’s plus-one. “Bradley brings his mother to every award show,” he said. “It’s very sweet, but I guess the question is how many times can one bring his mom as his date before he’s actually dating his mom?”
Kimmel previously hosted the Academy Awards last year — which happened to be the first Oscars since the infamous slap (naturally, Kimmel joked about the Will Smith incident during his opening monologue). He also tackled hosting duties in 2017, when he had to conclude the show following the infamous La La Land debacle, and the following year.
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