For a picture of how stunningly self-centered Hollywood is, Oscars host Jimmy Kimmel on Sunday was hard to beat.
The insufferable late-night “comedian” managed to turn a time-killing audience participation bit in the Dolby Theatre into a national disgrace by making fun of a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
And the social media reviews were brutal.
The first incident occurred when Kimmel was bringing questions for the audience of aware nominees and their guests and picked out Malala Yousafzai as his first target.
Yousafzai, 24, is an internationally recognized advocate for the education of women and girls who won the Nobel after surviving an assassination attempt by Taliban terrorists in Pakistan in 2012 when she was shot in the face while riding a bus home from school for her defiance of the Islamist group’s lunatic prohibition on girls’ education.
At 17, she is the youngest Nobel laureate in the history of the prizes.
That should be enough to earn the grudging respect of even the callowest Tinseltown grifter, but this is Jimmy Kimmel we’re talking about here — a man who was once so histrionically moved by the death of a South African lion that he wept on national television but is so vindictively self-righteous that he had no problem advising hospitals to turn away actual humans because they had not received the COVID-19 vaccination.
During a break in the ceremonies to allow a quick stage change, Kimmel ventured into the audience with questions he said were from viewers at home.
Check it out here:
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“Your work on human rights and education for women and children is an inspiration,” Kimmel read to Yousafzai, who was seated on an aisle. “As the youngest Nobel Prize winner in history, I was wondering, did you think Harry Styles spit on Chris Pine?”
The audience — possibly suspecting it was a set-up of some sort and waiting for a punchline — actually laughed at that.
(For those who have more important things going on in their lives than professional-wrestling-real Hollywood PR dustups — which is probably everyone reading this right now — the question related to a rumor that actor Harry Styles expectorated in fellow actor Chris Pine’s lap at the Venice International Film Festival in September. All involved claim he didn’t, according to the New York Post.)
It wasn’t a set-up, though. There was no punchline coming. And Yousafzai was clearly nonplussed by the question.
After an uncomfortable pause, she replied, “I only talk about peace.”
“That’s why you’re Malala and nobody else is,” Kimmel said, in an effort to try to salvage the moment that almost carried the day. “That’s a great answer, Malala.”
Unfortunately, Jimmy Kimmel must have remembered why he’s Jimmy Kimmel.
“The winner is, ‘Malala Land’, everybody,” he said.
That was another Hollywood in-joke, of course, referring to the 2017 Oscars debacle when presenters Warren Beatty and Fay Dunaway accidentally announced the incorrect winner of the Best Picture Oscar as “La-La Land.” (It was “Moonlight.”)
Kimmel probably thought it was genius.
If a similar exchange had taken place with a different man in a different context, say, Yousafzai with Greg Gutfeld at a Conservative Political Action Conference, it’s a dead certainty Gutfeld — or any other Republican playing the Kimmel role — would have been branded a racist on the spot for mocking a Pakistani woman’s name like that:
“All she did was get shot in the face for standing up for her rights. Hey, did you notice her name sounds like, ‘La-La Land’? Let’s play that for laughs.”
This was the Oscars, though, and Kimmel has already earned his obedience collar in the world of simpering weakness known as liberalism, so it was simply ignored by the Beautiful People as another Oscar routine that failed miserably.
The situation was not improved later when a human in a bear costume for the movie “Cocaine Bear,” showed up and apparently began to pester the young Pakistani, leading Kimmel to let out a nasally annoying, “Cocaine Bear, leave Malala alone.”
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To her credit — and very much in character — Yousafzai later tweeted what appeared to be a message appealing for calm among those angry at Kimmel: “Treat people with kindness,” she wrote.
But not everyone was so forgiving:
jimmy kimmel is a national disgrace. this woman deserves better
— Bardia Hashem (@BardiaHashem) March 13, 2023
“Malala looked so uncomfortable when jimmy kimmel was harassing her with his comedy,” one Twitter user wrote.
malala looked so uncomfortable when jimmy kimmel was harassing her with his comedy
— sagittarius’ groove ☽ (@sixinchfentys) March 13, 2023
“I love @jimmykimmel but his interaction with Malala was one of the worst and most painful things I’ve seen on TV in so many years,” another stated.
I love @jimmykimmel but his interaction with Malala was one of the worst and most painful things I’ve seen on TV in so many years.
— Walt Zink @waltzinkphotography@mstdn.party (@waltzink) March 13, 2023
watching the #Oscars from home, I was absolutely horrified with the interaction between @jimmykimmel and @Malala Jimmy, you were incredibly disrespectful.
— av (@_avybabe) March 13, 2023
This one might have put it best, though:
What a stupid thing to ask. Grow up.
— Randall Arsenault (@PCArsenault) March 13, 2023
“What a stupid thing to ask,” the user wrote. “Grow up.”
Unfortunately, advising a Hollywood low-life like Kimmel to “grow up” is asking for more magic than even movies can provide.
Kimmel probably thinks he is grown up, after all, playing a ringmaster role in a celebrity circus celebrating eternal immaturity.
He might think a rumored dispute between two utterly forgettable actors is important. He probably thinks that bit with Yousafzai — minimizing the actual heroism of an actual heroine for a cheap tawdry laugh — is what Americans outside Beverly Hills want to see.
Considering his warped worldview, he might even have thought it was funny.
But it was a classic moment in Hollywood history, an instant of undeniable evidence that the cinematic world is as utterly self-absorbed and uninterested in the real world as Norma Desmond was locked up in her palatial, crumbling estate.
Someone give Kimmel the hook. He’s been on way too long.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
