All the best moments from Jimmy Kimmel’s 2024 Oscars monologue
Jimmy Kimmel didn’t pull any punches during his opening monologue at the 2024 Oscars.
For his fourth time as host, the late-night talk show star entered the stage at the Dolby Theatre after a pretaped segment where he appeared in a scene from the movie “Barbie,” alongside Margot Robbie.
Once on the big stage, Kimmel thanked the star-studded audiences for their “partial standing ovation” before mentioning it was good to be in the room with “beautiful human actors.”
He thanked the crowd for making it to the venue on time — the 2024 Oscars started one hour earlier than usual — but also guaranteed that the ceremony would still end “very, very late.”
After making a quick crack at the recent box office bomb “Madame Web” (with it’s “enormous talent and untold potential”), Kimmel laid into Barbiemania, mentioning how it led a “plastic doll nobody even liked anymore” to become a feminist icon. He drew applause for shouting out the movie’s director Greta Gerwig — who many felt was snubbed by the academy for a best director nod — the comic called out the crowd for being “the ones who didn’t vote for her by the way. Don’t act like you don’t have nothing to do with this.”
He also assured Robbie and co-star Ryan Gosling that if they didn’t win an Oscar tonight, they already won the genetic lottery — “something much more important.”
“Ryan, you are so hot,” Kimmel joked from the stage to the Hollywood heartthrob. “Let’s go camping together and not tell our wives.”
Regarding “Oppenheimer,” the Brooklyn native joked about director Christopher Nolan’s lack of technology, the various pronunciation of Cillian Murphy’s name and roasted Robert Downey Jr.’s past substance abuse: this is the highest point of Robert Downey, Jr.‘s long and illustrious career. Well one of them. Was that too on the nose?”
Elsewhere in the monologue, Kimmel compared “Poor Things” star Emma Stone’s character to Sen. Katie Britt’s State of the Union rebuttal.
He noted that the five-time Oscar nominated actress plays “an adult woman with the brain of a child … like the lady who gave the rebuttal to the State of the Union.”
Kimmel, 56, joked that the recent crop of movies were “too long,” with an average running time of 2 hours and 20 minutes.
Regarding Martin Scorsese’s three-hour-plus “Killers of the Flower Moon,” he said it was so long, “you could drive to Oklahoma and solve the murders yourself.”
He also noted how “Killers” star Robert De Niro and “Nyad” star Jodie Foster both garnered Oscar nominations this year, nearly 50 years after receiving early career nods for “Taxi Driver.”
“In 1976, Jodie Foster was young enough to be Robert De Niro’s daughter. Now, she’s 20 years too old to be his girlfriend,” Kimmel joked — a biting reference to the 80-year-old actor’s new born baby with his 45-year-old girlfriend.
“The Man Show” alum ended his monologue on a high note, by encouraging a round of applause for the people behind the scenes of Hollywood and thanked the Teamsters for standing with the writers and actors during their 2023 labor strikes. Several crew members came out onstage, where they received a standing ovation.
“If you’re wearing Skechers to the Oscars, take a bow,” Kimmel said, before announcing “I’m going to make sure this show runs really long tonight so you can get a ton of overtime.”
