Ryan Reynolds’ Maximum Effort And Kimmelot Team For Mockumentary Oscar Ad Tribute To Made-Up Film Legend “Otto Desć”

deadline.com:

Tonight’s Oscar telecast featured a sincere (at least at first) black-and-white tribute to a film industry luminary named Otto Desć.

Despite the praise heaped on Desć by actor-director Elizabeth Banks, actor Ron Perelman, cinematographer Mandy Walker and visual effects supervisor Paul Lambert, it turns out that he doesn’t actually exist.

Instead, the spoof commercial is for Autodesk (get it?), a technology vendor with increasing ambitions in Hollywood. (Watch the full video above.) The commercial was produced by Maximum Effort, Ryan Reynolds’ creative agency and Kimmelot, with the latter’s Dan Sanborn.

The spoof gave Oscar host Jimmy Kimmel a voice even during the night’s ad breaks. Two teasers for the full mini-doc aired earlier in the show, laying it on thick about Desć before the final segment revealed the ruse, with the on-screen talent discovering it along with viewers. “Maximum Effort loves playing with the cultural landscape, and the Oscars are a major cultural event,” Reynolds said in a press release. “Autodesk has been a secret weapon for Hollywood’s artists for decades, and what better way to highlight that than to create a fake man of vaguely Germanic descent to receive an award that doesn’t exist?