On Sunday, March 12th the 95th Academy Awards were hosted by Jimmy Kimmel. Kimmel began the night by parachuting from the rafters exclaiming, “give me a second to adjust my danger zone here — my banshees are caught in my Inisherin.”
Kimmel then lightened the mood by making jokes about Nicole Kidman’s AMC theater advertisement. That isn’t to say the late-night performer was conservative with his jokes. He made fun of the Academy for its obvious nomination omissions: “How can you not nominate the man who directed ‘Avatar’? What do they think he is, a woman?”
Kimmel even called out “Babylon” for tanking, orrisking more wrath from the movie’s cult followers than an industry that didn’t like the movie to begin with. He then inserted a dig at Tom Cruise for his involvement in Scientology (“L. Ron Hubba Hubba, you know what I’m saying?”) referring to the shirtless beach football scene from his movie Top Gun: Maverick
Although Kimmel’s opening monologue won’t go down as historically hilarious, he continued to perform admirably during his intermittent appearances throughout the show. His one prominent post-monologue segment — the “questions from fans” bit while stagehands prepped for Rihanna’s performance — may have done more harm than good, what with his unnecessary “La La Land” riff on Malala Yousafzai‘s first name and iffy revival of his fake Matt Damon feud.
There were several stretches in the telecast in which every single winner seemed to be in tears, starting with “Pinocchio” helmer Guillermo del Toro getting choked up paying tribute to his late parents.
Ke Huy Quan’s win had even presenter Ariana DeBose in tears. In his speech he said, “My journey started on a boat,” Quan, now 51, was born in Vietnam during the war.
He continued, “I spent a year in a refugee camp and somehow I ended up here on Hollywood’s biggest stage. They say stories like this only happen in the movies. I cannot believe it’s happening to me. This is the American dream!” Quan’s Oscar triumph caps a four-decade journey that saw him involuntarily retire from acting in his early 20s because of a lack of roles for Asian actors in Hollywood.
“My manager [at the time] told me that maybe it would be easier if you were to have an American-sounding name,” Quan stated,who briefly went by “Jonathan Quan” and “Jonathan Ke Quan” in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.
He continued, “it’s insane that at one point I would try a different name than the one given to me, but it can only show you how desperate I was to try and make things different… Tonight, to see Ariana open that envelope and say my name, was a really special moment.”
Additionally, this night was very special for many other actors. After Michelle Yeoh didn’t get an Oscar nomination for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, how could she have imagined this moment 20 years later? Brendan Fraser had also become practically a forgotten man, and he allegedly experienced a trauma related to the industry’s other gold standard awards show. Despite all of this, he won the “Best Actor” award for his performance in the movie “The Whale.”
It wasn’t just actors getting carried away by the emotion of the night. Ruth E. Carterjust lost her 101-year-old mother, and as she accepted her second Oscar for costuming in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”, she issued the saddest and most hopeful line of the night: “Chadwick, please take care of mom.” And what a night it was for mothers with children in the industry, both Yeoh and Quan referencing their respective 84-year-old mothers.
The 2023 Oscars made it through unscathed. It’s more than likely this year’s ceremony will be remembered for the winners — which is really the ideal takeaway for a show that only exists to honor our finest filmmakers.
