Jimmy Kimmel’s Reveals His Envelope-Gate Thought Process

Now that we’re a year out from last year’s Best Picture envelope-geddon, where La La Land was mistakenly announced as the top Oscar winner, only for confusion to reign and chaos to take hold before the record was righted and Moonlight was announced as the rightful Oscar champ, last year’s Oscar host (and this year’s), Jimmy Kimmel, has been speaking freely about what was going through his mind during that whole ordeal. After Monday’s oral history of the event in The Hollywood Reporter and then Kimmel’s interview with People today, we learned a few things about where Kimmel was at (literally and figuratively) during the envelope snafu.

When the Whole Thing Went Down, Jimmy Was Sitting With Matt Damon

Kimmel had been planning to end the show with a bit needling Matt Damon — his longtime pretend-nemesis — for not winning any awards, so he was sitting next to Damon in the audience when Warren Beatty had Faye Dunaway read the wrong name. “I was sitting with Matt Damon (in the audience), and when we determined that something was awry, I thought somebody’s gotta go up there and say something. I thought, ‘Oh, I’m the only one who has a microphone on, so it should probably be me,'”

He Thought at First That It Was a Problem With the Prompter

Kimmel told THR: “I think the primary issue at rehearsal — and this was something that was in my head when that envelope moment happened — was how well [Beatty and Dunaway] could see the teleprompter.”

Denzel Washington Kept Him on Task

“I strolled up onstage, looked around to see what was happening and made a couple of jokes to try to settle things down,” Kimmel told People. “Denzel Washington actually gave me a signal to let the guys from Moonlight speak, which made sense. Luckily Denzel was thinking, because I really wasn’t…It was like I was walking around in a dream.”