The 2021 Oscars ceremony was the least watched to date, and even though Jimmy Kimmel and Chris Rock — who have both hosted the awards show before — did indeed tune in to this year’s broadcast, they weren’t exactly impressed with what they saw.
The pair traded jokes about the hostless ceremony on Thursday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, with Rock proudly boasting, “You know what we did this year, you and I? We didn’t host the Oscars!”
“We sure didn’t!” the ABC host, who presided over the 2017 and 2018 Academy Awards, responded. “It was a real weird feeling of relief to not have been involved in that at all.”
Neither explicitly stated where that sense of relief came from, but they both seemed to agree the show needed more humor.
“I was like a backseat driver,” Rock recalled. “Like my father used to say, ‘Brake! Brake!’ but I was like, ‘Joke! Joke!'”
Kimmel went on to compare the broadcast to Rock’s new film, Spiral: The Book of Saw.
“In a way, it’s like the opposite of your conversation with the people at Saw,” he began. “You’re like, ‘Have you ever considered adding some humor into the Saw series? Someone must have gone to the Oscars and said, ‘Have you ever considered subtracting all the humor from the Oscars?'”
“They did a good job if that was what they went for,” added Rock, who hosted the awards show in 2005 and again in 2016.
Rock and Kimmel certainly aren’t the first to be critical of this year’s Oscars. As The Hollywood Reporter‘s Daniel Fienberg noted in his review, the producers’ decision to make the best actor category the last of the evening fell flat when Anthony Hopkins wasn’t present to accept his win for The Father.
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