Cocaine Bear Joins Elizabeth Banks to Present Oscar

Elizabeth Banks had a special guest beside her when she presented the award for best visual effects to Avatar: The Way of Water at the 2023 Oscars.

The Cocaine Bear filmmaker was joined by a person in a bear costume, noting that if it weren’t for visual effects teams, the bear in her film would’ve looked like the one standing beside her.

“This is what the bear would look like. It’s terrifying,” Banks joked, as the mysterious person in the costume punched and kicked the air. “Stop it. No director wants to deal with this. OK, what are you doing?” she asked the bear, as her co-presenter pointed at people in the audience and at his nose.

“Are you trying to score right now? You need to wait till the after-party like everybody else,” she continued, referencing the bear in her movie being high on cocaine. “The coke is not real. It’s visual effects, right? It’s all of it.”

The bear then went on to mime all of the films that competed against Avatar: The Way of Water for best visual effects — All Quiet on the Western Front, The Batman, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Top Gun: Maverick — while Banks noted that they all had visual effects.

“Is that All Quiet on the Western Front?” Banks asked the bear when he started gesturing guns. “OK, that’s visual effects. It was a real war but real visual effects. Batman flying around is not real. Tom Cruise flying around is real, but also visual effects. Wakanda? Wakanda is totally real,” she stated, as the camera cut to Angela Bassett and Ryan Coogler, who nodded in agreement.

The bear later made another brief appearance in the audience when Jimmy Kimmel was playing a game with the audience, and the bear went up to Malala Yousafzai, who attended the Oscars for the first time.

“Cocaine Bear, leave Malala alone,” said the three-time host. “All right. We gotta get this guy out of here.”

For more from the 95th Academy Awards, see the star-studded Oscars red carpet arrivals.

Elizabeth Banks and #CocaineBear present at the #Oscars pic.twitter.com/1G1DcYvDiO

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) March 13, 2023