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Jimmy Kimmel Live Executive Producer Molly McNearney and Walt Disney TV Alternative Executive Rob Mills take a behind-the-scenes look at how this year’s Oscar show went
Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue was still ongoing when he was lifted into the rafters of the Dolby Theater five minutes before the start of the Oscars. It couldn’t be: Several of his gags would involve pop superstar Rihanna – but it all depended on her being in her seat.
“We had two versions of the monologue,” Molly McNearney, executive producer (and Kimmel’s wife) of “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” told Variety Monday afternoon. “One when Rihanna was in her seat, one when she wasn’t in her seat. One when Rihanna had her baby on her lap, which she wanted to do. And one when her baby wasn’t on her lap. A lot of our jokes were at the mercy of the people in their seats.”
Kimmel opened the Oscars by parachuting onto the stage. “As they pulled Jimmy up on that harness, we yelled at him, ‘Rihanna’s not in her seat! We’re going to adjust the prompter!’” McNearney said.
The preparation for a live award event is just as quick. There’s been a lot going on at the Oscars over the past few days, forcing some last-minute switcheroos. Kimmel, for example, had planned to spend a good chunk of his Oscars monologue on how Tom Cruise had helped save the films thanks to Top Gun Maverick. But when Cruise decided to pull out of this year’s event, most of those gags ended up on the cutting room floor.
“Jimmy loves Tom. Tom had just been on the show the week before,” McNearney said. “And they talked about seeing each other, and Jimmy was thrilled to tell him we got real Navy pilots to fly at the top of the Oscars. Jimmy was really disappointed that he didn’t come.”
Insiders had suggested that Cruise pulled out because he got wind that Judd Apatow — who cracked a series of brutal jokes at the DGA Awards at Cruise’s expense — was helping with Kimmel’s monologue. But that wasn’t really the case, and McNearney hopes that’s not why Cruise didn’t show up.
“Jimmy tends to broadcast his monologue to a group of people he trusts, comedy writers and comedians,” McNearney said. “They don’t help with the monologue. You just tell him this joke works, this joke doesn’t work. No, Judd didn’t write or do anything for the monologue.”
Would the “L. Ron Hubba Hubba joke was used when Cruise was in the room? “NO. We had about a three minute segment of the monologue dedicated to Tom Cruise, honoring him and his role in revitalizing the film industry. We were so disappointed to learn just days before the Oscars that he would not be there. Jimmy loves him and really wanted to celebrate him.”
Kimmel received strong positive marks for this year’s monologue, and he helped set the stage for a celebratory, emotionally charged evening. And as McNearney noted, it helped that there were more popular films in the mix that year, including Top Gun Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water, and Everything Everywhere All at Once.
“You have to make jokes about movies that you think the home audience hasn’t seen,” she said. “We’ve had a lot more jokes about ‘Tár,’ we’ve had some about ‘To Leslie,’ we’ve had jokes about all the movies, but it’s a real balance of jokes about what that space saw and what the home audience saw has seen . Luckily we had a Top Gun/Avatar year with the blockbuster movies. It’s really hard because jokes that would go down very well with industrial people, people back home don’t know what you’re talking about. You have to try to please both viewers at the same time, which is definitely a balancing act.”
One thing Kimmel chose to do when accepting the gig was not to focus on big pre-taped packages or flashy stunts. “We put a lot of time and energy into these big produced bits, whether they were live, like we did with the cinema break-in or the Hollywood tour bus that surprised people and brought them in. We also did bigger pre-recorded stuff like we did with Matt Damon. We’ve found that it’s a lot of work and doesn’t pay off very well. So we decided to stick with some simplicity and fun and focus on the people in the room.
“I think it went well, but it was risky for us,” she added. “Because we tend to lean on these larger produced bits. But we just broke it down to the jokes. And we wrote 17 rounds of jokes, I think. I mean, we have tons of jokes that will never be seen.”
Here are a few more behind-the-scenes tidbits about this year’s Oscars show from McNearney and Rob Mills, Walt Disney TV Executive VP of Unscripted and Alternative Entertainment:
Rihanna backstage at the 95th Oscars. ABC
Jimmy Kimmel checked and checked how to pronounce Rihanna’s name. Viewers used to hearing “Rihanna” with a soft “a” were confused when Kimmel said her name with an “anna” that rhymed with “banana.” But it turns out many of us mispronounced it (and there are plenty of videos online explaining this).
“Jimmy is obsessed with getting people’s names right,” McNearney said. “There’s a guy on the show whose job it is to find the pronunciations. We always find videos of the person saying their own name on camera. And that’s how you pronounce Rihanna. There’s a whole interview with her about it. Jimmy said, “I want to call her what she calls herself.” And so she says it in Barbados. It felt weird to people. Now America knows how to pronounce their name, although they won’t. They’ll just assume Jimmy screwed up, but no, he didn’t!”
Pedro Pascal at the Oscars
Michael B. Jordan, Pedro Pascal, Michelle Yeoh, Steven Spielberg and Andrew Garfield were informed just before it aired that they would be selected to be part of Kimmel’s “security team.” “I went to Michelle, Michael, Pedro, Andrew, Steven Spielberg and we told them minutes before the show started, ‘You’re going to be on camera, Jimmy is going to call you part of his security team. If you could just show some kind of physical support or punch him,'” McNearney said. “They were all in the game and were very supportive.” Garfield was asked if he would do a spider web sling for Spider-Man, but “he made his own choice. Which I thought was even better,” she added.
Elizabeth Banks and Cocaine Bear at the Oscars ABC
Inside that Cocaine Bear suit was someone you might recognize — but Kimmel is saving that revelation for his show. “Elizabeth Banks wrote the whole thing,” McNearney said of the part. “She’s great. She has perfect comedic timing.”
Lady Gaga at the Oscars Getty Images
Lady Gaga has finally been officially confirmed to perform on Friday. “On Thursday afternoon, we started hearing rumble,” Mills said. “And then on Friday she rehearsed with the other nominated musical performers… There wasn’t much of a Gaga saga, it seemed. She is in the process of directing a very high profile film [the next ‘Joker’]. So it’s pretty difficult to just drop everything and perform at the Oscars, especially when you’re an icon like Lady Gaga. You sometimes assume that people will show up and perform. And I think we kind of did it. Then we came to terms with the fact that the deadline probably wouldn’t work out. The irony, though, is that she didn’t have much time to think about it and committed a day or two before the show, otherwise I don’t know she would have done something so slimmed down. It was truly unforgettable.”
Kimmel and his writers decided not to be harsher on hit jokes because they felt it was Chris Rock’s story they should be telling. “We didn’t just want to do final year this year,” McNearney said. “I can’t tell you how many Will Smith jokes we had that we got rid of. We think that only the best has made it for this space. There were certainly some that ran harder, but we didn’t think it was our job to do that. That should be Chris Rock, not us.
“But we liked the idea of poking fun at the reaction to it over the past year,” she added. “I think we’re all still a little bit in shock at how that went and how everyone had to endure an acceptance speech after watching this violence.”
The Oscars are actually produced three times. “We do a full dress rehearsal on Saturday night and then a full rehearsal Sunday morning at 10 a.m.,” McNearney said. “We watched the whole show three times, and yet we didn’t feel bored the third time. It was proof of the way [Glenn Weiss and Ricky Kirshner] produced it. It went a lot quicker than I thought.”
Little did Malala Yousafzai, Colin Farrell and Jessica Chastain know they would be featured on the show. “Malala was an excellent sport,” McNearney said. “We met her at the Vanity Fair party. She couldn’t have been nicer and lovelier. She was concerned: ‘I hope my answer was okay.’ Well, we found her answer amazing.”
Pedro Pascal’s appearance as host was not timed to compete against the season finale of HBO’s The Last of Us. But the timing of the finale of this hit series affected ABC: “We had two things that worried me last night,” Mills said. “One of them was daylight saving time, when people are usually out longer at night. Ratings drop on the first night of Daylight Saving Time. And then ‘The Last of Us’ was interesting. It felt like HBO was saying, “We’re not afraid of the Oscars.” Our ratings have gone up. I think we proved that the Oscars are still the defining event in entertainment television during the season. And who knows, maybe they’ll drop it earlier next year or wait a week.”
Jimmy Kimmel and “RRR” Dancers (ABC) ABC
Kimmel is now the front-runner, hosting the Oscars again next year. “It’s being whispered about,” McNearney said. “We want to go on holiday first and then come back. Jimmy has had such positive feedback from the network and from the academy and from Billy Crystal who texted him. He can do it as long as he wants. I just don’t know if we have enough electrolytes and coffee.
“It’s a grueling, tough job,” McNearney said. “Jimmy fixes every single joke, every moment, like you wouldn’t believe it. Rounds and rounds and rounds of jokes, he rewrites this monologue several times, he has several stress dreams. He wakes up in the middle of the night thinking the prompter has failed.”
By the way, the teleprompter actually broke down this year. Kimmel had to do as he pleased with the introduction of the cut price. “I knew because he totally strayed from the script,” McNearney said. “He came out and talked about the importance of editing every time you read a text from your dad. I thought what’s up? Within three seconds one of our clerks said the prompter was off. I could only see it in his face. And he came back, he said, ‘I just did all this without being asked!’”
Mills knows viewers who tuned in to live mayhem like last year’s slap may have been disappointed. “I’m sorry there really wasn’t anything crazy about it,” he said. “All the envelopes were correct, no one slapped anyone, there wasn’t an outrageously bad dance number. We’ve come such a long way from Rob Lowe and Snow White to Naatu Naatu. There was really only good stuff.”
McNearney said she went into this year’s Oscars nervous because the return of eight awards and performances by all five song nominees could slow the show down.
“I thought, ‘oh no, we’re going to have a presenter associated with the longest and lowest-rated Oscars in history,'” she said. “And I was so pleasantly surprised at the heart and soul that went into the show. From the moment Jimmy took the stage, the audience was so incredibly warm and welcoming and loving… The audience made the show for me. The speeches were so beautiful. I cried for people. I had no idea who they were but I’m crying. The unsung hero of this show was the people in the seats.”