Fox News was outraged over a brief Donald Trump jab at the Oscars, even though the ceremony almost entirely steered clear of him for its three-and-a-half hour runtime.
“I was hopeful… that Conan O’Brien, who I thought could never be confused with Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert, would not morph into your average MSNBC host,” Fox News contributor Joe Concha said the Monday morning after the Oscars. “I just thought Conan was a little above this, but of course he went there.”
As first-time host this year, O’Brien barely went anywhere, actually, as he only made the one Trump-related comment throughout the entire show. “You know, Anora is having a good night,” O’Brien said, at this point three hours into the show with no mention of Trump so far. “That’s great news; two wins already. I guess Americans are excited to see somebody finally stand up to a powerful Russian,” he said, poking Trump for his cozy relationship with Putin—without even mentioning his name.
Fox pundits pounced on the brief moment, though it was the only semi-direct one. The few times presenters or award winners did get political on stage, they left Trump out of the equation.
Still, Concha insisted the show’s ratings would suffer due to O’Brien’s “lecturing.”
“We all want escapism when we watch the Oscars, but of course we couldn’t get it,” he whined. “We’ll probably hear that this was the lowest rated Oscars of all time because half the country just reflexively says, ‘I’m not going to watch this because I don’t want to be lectured.’”
The first and most well-received political statement of the night lasted all but a second, when Kill Bill star Daryl Hannah declared “Slava Ukraine,” before announcing the award for Best Editing.
After Adrien Brody was handed his award for Best Actor, he gave what is believed to be the longest acceptance speech in the show’s history, and though he spoke of the “repercussions of war and systematic oppression, and of anti-semitism, and racism,” he also made no mention of Trump.
Concha concluded, however, that O’Brien’s soft jab was an attempt at rewriting “history.” He said, “Conan, here’s a little history lesson. Putin invaded other countries under George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. The one president who was in office for four years when he didn’t invade, was Donald Trump, when he was in power.”
It was all a far cry from 2024’s show when host Jimmy Kimmel was actually forced to kill time towards the end of the night by reading aloud from Trump’s review of the ceremony on Truth Social.
“I’m surprised you’re still up,” Kimmel joked that year after sharing Trump’s complaints about his hosting job. “Isn’t it past your jail time?”
