Jimmy Kimmel’s Oscars Monologue Began With A Barbie Reference

Jimmy Kimmel is back at the Oscars. The talk-show host opened the 2024 Academy Awards on March 10 with a popcorn monologue that jumped from various nominees to event attendees — but he started with a joke about the show’s earlier-than-usual start time. “We may be starting early but we’ll still end very, very late,” he said. “We’re already over by 5 minutes, and I’m not even joking.”

Kimmel then went into a series of jokes about this year’s most nominated films, starting with Barbie.

First, he said Greta Gerwig should’ve been nominated for Best Director, eliciting applause from the crowd. “Don’t act like you had nothing to do with this,” he responded. He then gave a shout-out to stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, saying that regardless of whether they win, they already won “the genetic lottery,” before nodding to Brokeback Mountain: “Ryan, you are so hot. Let’s go camping together and not tell our wives.”

Kimmel then moved on to Oppenheimer, the most nominated film of the night, and its star Cillian Murphy. “Interesting fact about his name: When he does drama, it’s pronounced Cillian. When he does comedy, it’s pronounced Silly-Ann,” he joked.

Murphy’s co-star Robert Downey Jr. was Kimmel’s next target. “[Downey Jr.] played the villain in a movie where Tim Allen turns into a dog,” Kimmel mentioned, nodding to 2006’s The Shaggy Dog. He then suggested that if they wanted to remake the film, they should cast Messi, the dog from Anatomy of a Fall, who was sitting in the audience.

Before long, Kimmel had roasted most of the films up for awards, from Emma Stone’s Poor Things to Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour-long Killers of the Flower Moon. “When I saw Killers, I had my mail forwarded to the theater,” he joked.

He also joked about individual stars, even bringing up Bradley Cooper’s mother, Gloria, who attended as her son’s plus-one. “Bradley brings his mother to every award show,” he said. “It’s very sweet, but I guess the question is how many times can one bring his mom as his date before he’s actually dating his mom?”

Kimmel is familiar with this stage, having hosted three times before. He helmed the Academy Awards last year — the first since the infamous slap, which he naturally joked about in his opening monologue — and also in 2017, the year of the wild La La Land mixup.