Ratings were continuing to climb for the 96th annual Oscars that took place March 12, especially following the all-time lows of the pandemic years.
With Jimmy Kimmel returning for his fourth stint as host and second in a row, reviews were upbeat for the most part and the show benefited from a good movie year with blockbusters like Barbie and Best Picture winner Oppenheimer.
Oscarcast executive producers Raj Kapoor, Katy Mullan and Molly McNearney (who also was a writer) and director Hamish Hamilton joined Deadline’s Contenders Television: Documentary + Unscripted event to break it down. RELATED: Contenders TV Docs + Unscripted – Deadline’s Full Coverage McNearney, who is also married to Kimmel and is executive producer and co-head writer of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, talked about how they approached creating Kimmel’s key opening monologue. “Well, this year we did something new which I thought worked really well.
We used the staff at Jimmy Kimmel Live!, so all of Jimmy’s writers — there are 19 on staff that really know his voice very well, and we also teamed with the incomparable Jon Macks, who is an excellent award-show writer, and he had three writers of his own who were exceptional, and we did everything together,” she said. “So, if they had a monologue joke they wanted to throw to us, we looked at that.
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