Oscars Team Tells All: Getting John Cena Naked, Jimmy Kimmel’s Trump Joke and Why Al Pacino Skipped the Best Picture Nominees (EXCLUSIVE)
variety.comMichael Schneider Variety Editor at Large Just minutes before the Oscars were set to begin, the show’s producers realized they had a problem: Some of the year’s key A-listers and nominees weren’t inside the Dolby Theatre just yet.
The perfect storm of traffic delays, pro-Palestine protests, the first day of daylight saving time and an earlier start time had contributed to the last-minute crunch. “We were definitely stressed out, because we had to have certain celebrities in their seats,” Oscars producer Molly McNearney — also an EP on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” — tells Variety on Monday morning. “We talk to people in the monologue.
And in order to for that to pay off, you want to see their reactions. We were still waiting on five or six people to get into their seats.
It was definitely chaotic to get them all in quickly. So we pushed by five minutes, which didn’t feel like too much.” Among the names mentioned in host Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue were Lily Gladstone, Ryan Gosling, Cillian Murphy, Margot Robbie, Robert Downey Jr.
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