Why Jimmy Kimmel Is Right About the Oscars (Column)
12.02.2022 - 23:05
/ variety.com
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticLet’s start with something most of us can agree on: Jimmy Kimmel, who I’m a fan of, is probably not the ideal messenger for how to fix the Oscars, if indeed they need fixing. Kimmel hosted the Academy Awards in 2017, and did a lively enough job of it that he was asked back to host again the following year.
His spirit is hooked up to movies; you feel that when a movie star is a guest on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” But when Kimmel blasted the Oscars in his opening monologue on Feb. 8, saying, “‘The Power of the Dog’ got 12 nominations, one for every person who saw it,” he made himself sound like the sort of righteous fanboy who wants to see nothing but Marvel and “Jackass.”Maybe he is.
But if Kimmel were hosting the Oscars this year and, during the show, made that same crack about “The Power of the Dog,” a lot of us would be at home chuckling at what a good line it is. I know, I know: We’re all supposed to bow down before Netflix and the awesomeness of its holy vaunted metrics.
“The Power of the Dog” was seen… by a whole lot of eyeballs! “Don’t Look Up” was seen… by a whole lot of eyeballs! (“The Irishman,” according to those same metrics, was also seen by a whole lot of eyeballs, but two years ago, when Martin Scorsese’s gangster epic was Netflix’s big fish, the company hadn’t yet figured out how to sell those metrics by giving them the analog glow of box-office grosses.) Kimmel, in his “Power of the Dog” line, sounded to people — or, at least, to the people on Film Twitter — like he was dissing the very idea of a movie that strives to be art as mightily as Jane Campion’s film does. Yet I think he was also getting at something about the streaming era: that however many eyeballs saw “The Power of
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