Jimmy Kimmel was out of pocket at the Oscars

2:40 PMLong before he was playing damage control at the Dolby Theater on Sunday night, Jimmy Kimmel was doing his best to keep the crowd engaged during the 89th Academy Awards in Los Angeles. By the time the mess unfolded onstage and eventually the best picture award went to Moonlight, Kimmel had already told enough jokes to make a certain amount of people believe he might be responsible for the egregious error.

But while PricewaterhouseCoopers’ incompetence, which led to an embarrassing moment for all around, was one thing, another thing stood out from the performance: Kimmel making fun of people’s names. In a year in which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was making what appeared to be a genuinely concerted effort to highlight diversity and inclusion, there was the host, openly taking steps backward.

“Tonight is proof that art has no borders, no single language and does not belong to a single faith,” Cheryl Boone Isaacs, president of the Academy, said onstage. “The power of art is that it transcends all these things.”

Jimmy Kimmel makes jokes about ethnic sounding names like a New England frat boy at a small liberal arts college.

— Clint Smith (@ClintSmithIII) February 27, 2017

Bruh @jimmykimmel, making fun of names you can't pronounce isn't funny. like sorry my parents didn't name me Britney or Sarah.

— Chanapa (@chanapa_t) February 27, 2017

Well, if that’s the case, what’s so funny about the name Mahershala or Yulerie? Let’s be clear: This is Hollywood. The relationship between portrayal and power is effectively the reason for its existence. We’re talking about an industry in which people create stage names, for the exact purpose of placating themselves to the Anglo-Saxon norms that long ruled the credits of films. Names matter.

There was also the extremely awkward matter of Kimmel running an odd bit with 8-year-old actor Sunny Pawar in which he held him up in the air with the Lion King’s “Circle of Life” playing in the background, like when Rafiki did the same with Simba. Again, it’s not always about overt racism. There are plenty of things that thematically are just not culturally appropriate, such as using a young Indian boy to recreate a scene basically on a fictional African pride of lions, simply because he was in a movie of a similar title. Luckily, Pawar saved it because he’s awesome, but the point was made.

Meanwhile, Mahershala Ali became the first Muslim to win an award. A couple of movies that didn’t feature black folks as just the paid or unpaid help made it into the winners circle. As important, movies about black people were nominated as documentaries, and a film about the civil war in Syria actually took away an award.

Wish Jimmy Kimmel wouldn't invite poc into the theatre and insult their names

— Stupid Sexy Flanders Fields (@beefilmnz) February 27, 2017

https://twitter.com/AnandWrites/status/836061032363749377

This is all to say that by the time we got around to the end, it was an important moment. And for whatever reason, after marginalizing an Oscar winner and an unwilling prank member over what people call them, suddenly Kimmel felt bad for the entire cast and crew of La La Land, because they were apparently humiliated. And he managed to blame a black person, while he was at it.

“I think you guys should keep it anyway. Guys, this is very unfortunate what happened. Personally, I blame Steve Harvey for this,” he said, referring to the December 2015 incident in which Harvey botched the winner’s announcement in a live show. “I would like to see you get an Oscar, anyway,” he said. “Why can’t we just give out a whole bunch of them?”

Uh, WHAT? Now that the oh-so-vaunted system of envelopes and reveals has embarrassed the very people who made an entire film about how awesome the industry is, suddenly, we’re going to joke about how we should make it a participation award? God forbid we kick anyone offstage to make way for an all-black cast that rocked the establishment with a movie that had a budget of less than $2 million.

Kimmel's response was pretty typical of how society tries to minimise black success

— Bethany Marsh (@bethany_marsh) February 27, 2017

Kimmel is a comedian and his bits in general provide a level of levity that the obviously stuffy Academy Awards need. Making fun of the president is one thing, but blindsiding people on national TV and/or mocking the biggest moment of their lives is just pointless. But, he learned a pretty valuable lesson Sunday, which is that it’s not as much fun when the joke’s on you.

Then again, who knows. It may have been his idea all along. Which definitely isn’t funny either.