Jimmy Kimmel Reveals Matt Damon Oscar Bit Cut by Best Picture Debacle
We’ve likely not finished the fallout of Sunday’s big Oscar snafu, though few would place any blame at the feet of host Jimmy Kimmel, who wandered out to bring some humor to the La La Land error. In all the chaos, however, Kimmel’s final bit with Matt Damon ended up lost to time, as the host now explains how the show was meant to end.
Prior to Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty mistakenly announcing La La Land over Moonlight for Best Picture, host Kimmel had made another running gag of his longtime feud with Matt Damon. As Kimmel tells the Bill Simmons Podcast (via EW), however, that gag was to culminate after the Best Picture announcement with a final cut to Kimmel gloating over Damon’s Manchester By the Sea loss, mirroring what Damon had done to Kimmel at the 2016 Emmys:
I’d be sitting next to him and it would start on me. I’d start wrapping the show up but then the camera would widen and we’d see that Matt would be sitting next to me and I would say, ‘Well, you know it’s unbelievable, you know Casey [Affleck] won [best actor] and Kenneth [Lonergan] won [best original screenplay]. There’s only one person who didn’t win tonight and it’s you.’ It would have been a nice little button to the whole night.
Kimmel was sitting with Damon at the time, and apparently overlooked the controversy onstage until his onscreen rival pointed it out:
We’re watching and waiting for the camera but suddenly the stage manager wanders on set, which is never supposed to happen and he’s in the shot, which I know is not supposed to happen. So I really don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t hear very well, so Matt picks up someone saying they have the wrong movie for Best Picture. He says to me, ‘I think they announced the wrong best picture,’ and I said, ‘What?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I heard them saying that it’s the wrong movie,’ and I looked at Matt and I said, ‘Well, I guess I better go out there,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I guess you better.’
Kimmel’s hosting ran otherwise smoothly (the content of certain jokes is another matter), but might the Jimmy Kimmel Live! host’s next major MC gig address the fallout? Could the 2017 Oscar host have moved on to bigger things by then?