Oscar audiences have never heard Will Smith’s ‘tougher’ jokes

The Oscars kicked off with a joke about The Slap, and we heard a few others along the way, but by and large this year’s show avoided that vibe. Executive producer Molly McNearny had predicted this prior to airing (hoping to be comedic and move on). She now reveals that there was actually a lot more in the works and those jokes would have been more cutthroat.

However, McNearny lets the world know that Kimmel and his writing team have decided to retire for a number of reasons. That includes getting over the incident (which still fuels the spin-off’s drama) so this year’s show can stand on its own, and they also wanted to let Chris Rock do the “tougher” jokes. He certainly did that a week earlier when he took off the gloves for his Selective outrage special. Here’s why that decision was made, via diversity:

Kimmel and his writers decided not to be harsher on hit jokes because they felt it was Chris Rock’s story they should be telling. “We didn’t just want to do final year this year,” McNearney said. “I can’t tell you how many Will Smith jokes we had that we got rid of. We think that only the best has made it for this space. There were certainly some that ran harder, but we didn’t think it was our job to do that. That should be Chris Rock, not us.

“But we liked the idea of ​​poking fun at the reaction to it over the past year,” she added. “I think we’re all still a little shocked at how that went.”

Fair enough. That punch might have saved the Oscars the year before, but it makes sense that the show would want to prove that it could pull in viewers without that kind of drama. Walt Disney TV alternate head Rob Mills also shared it diversity that he was worried about HBO moving forward with them The last of us Final the same evening. “It felt like HBO was saying, ‘We’re not scared of the Oscars,'” Mills suggested. However, Mills also insisted: “Our ratings have gone up. I think we’ve proven that the Oscars are still the defining event of entertainment television during the season.”

Maybe the Oscars ratings are “up” from last year (over 18 million viewers on the night of the show) but The last of us The ratings could be even higher when the final figures are known. And both companies are doing well, which is a good place to be in the TV and film space.

(Above diversity)