Jimmy Kimmel returns to the Oscars. The talk show host kicked off the 2024 Academy Awards ceremony on March 10 with a popcorn monologue covering a variety of nominees and event attendees, but he ended with a note about the show starting earlier than usual The joke begins. "We might start very early, but we're still going to end very, very late," he said. "We're over for 5 minutes, I'm not kidding."
Kimmel then told a series of jokes about the most nominated movies of the year, starting with "Barbie."
First, he said Greta Gerwig should be nominated for best director, earning applause from the audience. "Don't act like you had nothing to do with this," he replied. He then gave a shout-out to stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, saying they had won the "genetic lottery" whether they won or not, before nodding to Brokeback Mountain : " Ryan, you're so hot. We Let’s go camping together and don’t tell our wives.”
Kimmel then turned to the night's most nominated film, "Oppenheimer," and its star Cillian Murphy. "Here's a fun fact about his name: When he was doing drama, it was pronounced Cillian. When he was doing comedy, it was pronounced 'Silly-Ann ,'" he joked.
Murphy's costar Robert Downey Jr. is Kimmel's next target. "[Downey Jr.] played the villain in the movie where Tim Allen turned into a dog," Kimmel mentioned, paying homage to 2006's "Shaggy Dog." He then suggested that if they wanted to remake the movie, they should star Macy, the dog from Anatomy of a Fall who was sitting in the audience.
Before long, Kimmel was baking most of the award-winning films, from Emma Stone's "Poor Things" to Martin Scorsese's three-and-a-half-hour "Killers of the Flower Moon." “When I saw ‘Killer, ’ I forwarded the email to the theater,” he joked.
He also poked fun at individual stars, even mentioning Bradley Cooper's mother Gloria, who is her son's plus one. "Bradley brings his mother to every award show," he said. "That's sweet, but I guess the question is, how many times can a guy bring his mom as his date before he actually goes on a date with his mom?"
Kimmel is familiar with this stage, having hosted it three times before. Last year, he helmed the Academy Awards — the first since the infamous slap, which he naturally joked about in his opening monologue — and 2017, which also saw La La Land "City" has been a year of crazy mix and match.
