Close your eyes. Now, feel.
You’re so beautiful.
I know. I was just thinking that. I haven’t eaten in 3 weeks. I’m so hungry. I have to go host the Oscars.
Live from the Dolby Theater in Hollywood, please welcome tonight’s host, Jimmy Kimmel!
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Hi, everybody. Well, it’s very kind. Thank you, thank you very much. Thank you for that partial standing ovation… and welcome to the 96th Oscars, everybody. Look at these beautiful human actors. What an honor it is to be here. Thank you for having me back, and congratulations to each and every one of you for making it to the Academy Awards and for making it on time. The show, as you know, is starting an hour early this year, but don’t worry, it will still end very, very late. In fact, we’re already 5 minutes over, and I am not joking. I’m not going to lie, it’s going to be a long night after what was a long year. It was a hard year, but it was also a great year for movies. Despite the fact that everything stopped, the people in this room somehow managed to come up with so many excellent films and so many memorable performances. This night is full of enormous talent and untold potential, but so was Madame Web, so who knows? Are we all to a bumpy start?
Okay, this is a meaningful occasion for most of you, I know that, and I know that winning an Oscar is something you’ve dreamed about since you were a kid. And now here we are, all dressed up, celebrating the best of the best, beginning with the biggest movie of the year, Barbie. Barbie was a monster hit. What a thing, what an achievement. To take a plastic doll nobody even liked anymore… I mean, my wife… Before this movie, you’d have had a better chance of getting my wife to buy our daughter a pack of Marlboro Reds than a Barbie doll. Now, Barbie’s a feminist icon, thanks to Greta Gerwig, who many believe deserve to be nominated for Best Director. Hold on, I know you’re clapping, but you’re the ones who didn’t vote for her. By the way, don’t act like you had nothing to do with this!
And I don’t want to leave out Margot Robbie. Margot put this giant hit together. She, you did. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling are here tonight. Look, kids, it’s Barbie and Ken, sitting just near each other. Ryan and Margot, I want you to know that even if neither one of you wins an Oscar tonight, you both already won something much more important: the genetic lottery. Ryan, you are so hot. Let’s go camping together and not tell our wives.
And then we have the other major box office winner this year, Oppenheimer, directed by the great Christopher Nolan, also a very attractive man. And this is a very… this is a fascinating person. Christopher Nolan doesn’t have a smartphone. He doesn’t use email. And he writes his scripts on a computer with no internet connection, connection, which is a powerful way of saying, “I will not allow my porn addiction to get in the way of my work.”
Christopher is joined by his longtime collaborator, Cillian Murphy, who is just wonderful. Cillian, is… interesting fact about his name, it’s pronounced ‘Killian’ when he does drama. When he does comedy, it’s ‘Cillianne.’
And congratulations to Cillian’s co-star, Robert Downey Jr., who is… This night is… This is the highest point of Robert Downey Jr.’s long and illustrious career. Well, one of the highest points. Um… But Robert has been… Was that too on the nose, or is that a drug motion you made? But look at him. I mean, look at this guy. He’s so handsome, so talented. He’s won every award there is to win. Is that an acceptance speech in your pocket, or do you just have a very rectangular penis? What a story. Not even 20 years ago, things weren’t going that great for Robert. He played the villain, and correct me if I have this wrong, in a movie where Tim Allen turns into a dog, right? And if you ever decide to remake that film, I have just a guy to play Tim Allen.
That is… Where is he? Messi, who, even though he’s a dog, may have given the performance of the year in Anatomy of a Fall. Messi has an overdose scene. If you’ve seen it, you know it is incredible. Honestly, I haven’t seen a French actor eat vomit like that since Gerard Depardieu.
The second most nominated movie of the year is Poor Things, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. There he is. Not only is Yorgos nominated for Best Director, his editor, whose name is also Yorgos, Yorgos Mavropsaridis, is nominated too. We have two Yorgoses in the house tonight. Will they both win? Yor gos is as good as mine. Alright, let’s get… uh, 20 seconds for room tone.
Emma Stone is an Oscar nominee for the fifth time, right? The fifth time. This is… And she is, Emma, you are… you’re so unbelievably great in Poor Things. Emma played an adult woman with the brain of a child, like the lady who gave the rebuttal to the State of the Union on Thursday night. And… and you were just amazing.
There were so many great movies that held audiences captive this year, and I mean that literally. Your movies were too long this year. The average length of the top 10 movies was 2 hours and 23 minutes. That’s up 30 minutes from 3 years ago. When I went to see Killers of the Flower Moon, I had my mail forwarded to the theater. Killers of the Flower Moon is so long, in the time it takes you to watch it, you could drive to Oklahoma and solve the murders yourself.
The multi-talented Bradley Cooper is here with us tonight, with his… he’s got another Best Picture nominee with Maestro. Bradley brought your mom to the show tonight. Hi, Mrs. Cooper. How are you? You’re doing good? Great. Uh, Bradley brings his mother to every award show, right? She was… your date last year at the Oscars, and not okay, but the… and the Tony, and the uh, Soul Train Awards, etc. It’s very sweet, but I guess the question is, how many times can one bring his mom as his date before he is actually dating his mom? Are you working on a movie about Freud right now and not telling us?
Here’s some fun Oscar trivia: 48 years ago, Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster were nominated for Taxi Driver, and they are both nominated again tonight. 1976 was the year. And that’s pretty crazy. In 1976, Jodie Foster is young enough to be Robert De Niro’s daughter. Now she’s 20 years too old to be his girlfriend.
I also want to congratulate Robert’s co-star, Lily Gladstone, who is the first Native American ever to be nominated for Best Actress, and she… um, for Killers of the Flower Moon. And if you saw it, you know that it was riveting. And did you know that before she got this movie, Lily was ready to quit acting and take a job at the Department of Agriculture tracking murder hornets? Right? Yeah, and now she’s nominated for an Oscar, which is so great for her, but also makes me worried that no one’s tracking these murder hornets.
Lily is in excellent company. We have many first-time acting nominees tonight, including Emily Blunt, Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, America Ferrera, America, Daniel Brooks, Colman Domingo, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, and Sandra Hüller.
For the first time ever, three foreign language films are up for Best Picture, and two of them star Sandra Hüller. Which is, I mean, Sandra, two movies. Sandra plays a woman on trial for murdering her husband in Anatomy of a Fall, and a Nazi housewife living next to Auschwitz in The Zone of Interest. And while these are very heavy subjects for American movie-goers, in uh, Sandra’s native Germany, they’re called rom-coms.
For the first time in more than two decades, we’re adding a new category to the Oscars. Not tonight, don’t worry. In the future, they will be adding an Oscar for Achievement in Casting, which… yeah, you better, you better applaud for that. And that is great news for actors because now, not only will you be able to watch someone else win an Oscar for a part you didn’t get, you will also be able to watch the person who didn’t think you were right for it win one, too.
What a year we’ve had. It was a tough year. Remember that kid from the Fablemans? This is what he looks like now. Very good to have you here, Steven. Steven, are you nominated tonight, or are you here because you have season tickets? Steven and his wife, Kate Capshaw, donated a lot of money to help actors and writers who were out of work over the summer. We were on strike for a long time, for 148 days, for 5 months. This group of writers, actors, directors—the people who actually make the film—said, “We will not accept a deal.” Well, not the directors; you guys folded immediately. But the rest of us said, “We will not accept a deal without protections against artificial intelligence.” And as a result, actors no longer have to worry about getting replaced by AI. Thanks to this historic agreement, actors are now able to go back to worrying about being replaced by younger, more attractive people. And I think that’s great. And writers, could AI have written Transformers: Rise of the Beasts? Yes, the answer is yes.
We learned a lot while we were out on those picket lines. The strike raised existential questions about our industry, like, if a movie premieres at The Grove and there are no actors there to promote it, does Mario Lopez make a sound? And now that the strike is over, now that Fran Drescher has returned to her volunteer work reading loudly to the hearing impaired, we can be proud of the fact that this long and difficult work stoppage taught us that this very strange town of ours, as pretentious and superficial as it could be, at its heart, is a union town. It’s… it’s not just a bunch of heavily Botoxed, Hailey Bieber smoothie-drinking, diabetes prescription-abusing, gluten-sensitive, nepo babies with perpetually shivering chihuahuas. This is a coalition of strong, hardworking, mentally tough American laborers, women and men who would 100% for sure die if we even had to touch the handle of a shovel.
But the reason we were able to make a deal is because of the people who rallied beside us. So before we celebrate ourselves, let’s have a very well-deserved round of applause for the people who work behind the scenes: the Teamsters, the truck drivers, the lighting crew, sound, camera, gaffers, grips. That’s right, all the people who refuse to cross the picket lines. There they are. If you’re wearing Skechers to the Oscars, take a bow. Come on, guys, take a bow. Take a bow. You deserve it. Thank you for standing with us, and also, we want you to know that in your upcoming negotiation, we will stand with you too.
And also, I’m going to make sure this show goes really long tonight, so you get a ton of overtime.
It’s golden time, everybody. Should we give out some Oscars? All right, we have surprises planned for each of the acting categories tonight, five surprises in fact. And we’re going to kick it off with the Oscar for Actress in a Supporting Role.
