Donald Trump wasn’t present at the Oscars 2017 ceremony at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood on Sunday evening, but that didn’t stop the celebrities from roasting the American president. Well, to be fair to Hollywood stars and their foreign peers, a mouthful against Donald Trump was long due.
The show’s host Jimmy Kimmel led from the word go as he took on Trump for his controversial policies that are making minorities and liberals in the US nervous.
“I wanna say thank you to President Trump — remember last year when we thought the Oscars were racist?” the host-cum-comedian remarked at the event.
Kimmel’s speech was full of colourful jibes aimed at Trump.”Some of you will get to come up on this stage tonight and give a speech that the President of the United States will tweet about in all-caps during his 5 a.m. bowel movement tomorrow, and I think that’s pretty darn excellent.”
Kimmel went on entertaining the enjoying crowd as he turned his attention to Donald Trump’s mistrust of “fake” news media. At one point during his hosting, he said, “If there’s anyone here from CNN, or the LA or New York Times — if you work for anything with the word ‘Times’ in it, even Medieval Times — I’d like to ask you to leave the building right now… We have no tolerance for fake news. Fake tans, we love…”
Several celebrities and winners also chipped in with words of advice for the US president, who last month signed in an executive order banning immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. News website Mashable highlights the comments of Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi, the maker of The Salesman, best foreign language movie this year. Farhadi boycotted the Oscars in protest against Trump’s executive order on immigration,
“It’s a great honor to be receiving this valuable award for a second time. I’m sorry I’m not with you tonight, my absence is out of respect for the people of my country and those of the other six nations who have been disrespected by the inhumane law that bans entry of immigrants to the U.S. Dividing the world into the ‘us’ and ‘our enemies’ categories creates fear. A deceitful justification for aggression and war, these wars prevent democracy and human rights in countries which have themselves been victims of aggression. Filmmakers can turn their cameras to capture shared human qualities and break stereotypes of various nationalities and religions. They create empathy between us and others, an empathy that we need today more than ever.”
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The criticism of Donald Trump at the Oscars didn’t stop there. Hollywood award-winners were especially brutal in their criticism of the president.
The director of Moonlight, the movie which went on to win the best movie award at this year’s event, expressed solidarity with people who are in the firing line of Trump’s social and immigration policies. In his acceptance speech for award for Best Adapted Screenplay, Barry Jenkins remarked
“All you people out there who feel like there’s no mirror for you, that your life is not reflected, the Academy has your back; the ACLU has your back; we have your back; and for the next four years we will not leave you alone, we will not forget you.”
The winner for the Best Documentary Short for Netflix’s The White Helmets, director Orlando von Einsiedel, made a strong statement in his acceptance speech as he cited a verse from The Quran
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“We’re so grateful that this film has highlighted our work to the world. Our organization is guided by a verse from the Quran: ‘to save one life is to save all of humanity.’ We have saved more than 82,000 Syrian lives. I invite anyone here who hears me to work on the side of life, to stop the bloodshed in Syria and around the world. It’s very easy for these guys to feel they’re forgotten; this war’s been going on for six years.”
There were sympathizers of Hispanic Americans last night too, who didn’t miss the opportunity to attack Trump for his apparent hostile rhetoric towards the community. Mashable reports that Gael Garcia Bernal viciously attacked one of Trump’s election-clincher promise of building a wall between US and Mexico,
“Flesh and blood actors are migrant workers; we travel all over the world, we build families, we construct stories, we build life that cannot be divided. As a Mexican, as a Latin-American, as a migrant worker, as a human being, I’m against any form of wall that wants to separate us.”
But when it came to bashing and mocking Trump, nobody did it better that show host Jimmy Kimmel.
He kept going on and on, “We’re more than two hours into the show and Donald Trump hasn’t tweeted at us once. I’m starting to get worried about him.” Naturally, then, he sent a couple of tweets to make sure POTUS was okay — and to let him know that Meryl Streep said hi.”
