Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel has said that the show’s producers tried to stop him reading out Donald Trump’s social media post attacking him and the Oscars during the live telecast on Sunday.
Shortly before the show’s close, Kimmel read out part of Trump’s message on Truth Social, which the former president had posted a short time earlier. “Has there ever been a worse host than Jimmy Kimmel at the Oscars. His opening was that of a less than average person trying too hard to be something which he is not, and never can be.” Trump also called the show “disjointed, boring, and very unfair” before closing with “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Kimmel thanked Trump for watching, before asking: “Isn’t it past your jail time?”
Kimmel revealed after the show that producers had attempted to dissuade him from reading out Trump’s post. Speaking to Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos for Live with Kelly and Mark after the show, Kimmel said that the Oscars’ producers had spoken to him about the message. “I was like, ‘I’m reading the Trump tweet,’ and they’re like, ‘No, no, don’t read that.’ [I said:] ‘Yes I am.’”
On his own talk show, Kimmel said the show’s producers were also nervous about the attention-grabbing stunt featuring a naked John Cena, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the streak by Robert Opel in 1974. Kimmel said: “Of all the times I’ve hosted the Oscars or the Emmys or anything, no comedy bit has ever received more scrutiny than this. There were meetings and side meetings, emails and texts and phone calls and people sweating. Somebody was crying. Then, once they realised we weren’t going to take no for an answer, there were intense discussions about the size of the envelope, whether we needed to Velcro it to John’s body, to fill his crack or have socks, various testicalia was discussed […] They kept demanding that we make the envelope bigger.”
He added: “Very rarely does an idea literally push the envelope, and this one did.”
Kimmel also commented further on Trump, saying: “It kind of tells you all you need to know about Donald Trump … He wrote this because he was upset I didn’t mention him on the show. No one mentioned him on the show. He wasn’t getting any attention, he couldn’t stand it […] I wasn’t planning to mention him at all. We were backstage, the show was almost over and one of the other writers was like, ‘Hey look at this.’ And to quote Al Pacino, just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. I had to read it.”
He added: “We had John Cena on stage naked and somehow Donald Trump still managed to be the biggest dick of the night.”
