During his monologue on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" on Monday night, the host broke down the snafu in detail, revealing that he was sitting in the audience watching the presentation, since he planned to end the show while doing one final bit with Matt Damon. But that bit never happened, because while the "La La Land" team was in the midst of accepting the award, Kimmel noticed the show's stage manager come out onto the stage, something that never happens.
Here's the INSIDE story of what happened at the craziest #Oscars ever last night... @TheAcademy @ABCNetwork http://pic.twitter.com/w6xgsoaXSM
— Jimmy Kimmel (@jimmykimmel) February 28, 2017
The host realized he should probably go up on stage, too, but still didn't know what was going on. That's when "La La Land" producer Jordan Horowitz took the mic to reveal that "Moonlight" had actually won.
"It was kind of scary, in a way," Kimmel said. " ... He's standing there holding an Oscar that they're now going to take away from him, and my first instinct was to tell him to run -- take that Oscar and get out. But he didn't. So now there's mass confusion. The audience is confused, the people standing around me are confused, I assume everyone at home is confused, and I'm probably supposed to do something, because no one's doing anything. And then Warren Beatty steps up to explain."
Later, Kimmel and Beatty powwowed backstage (co-presenter Faye Dunaway, meanwhile, "got the hell out of there," Kimmel said. "She wanted no part of this."), where the presenter showed the host the incorrect Best Actress envelope and the pair tried to figure out how Beatty got that card in the first place. The rest of the night, the host said, was spent being accosted at the after parties by people clamoring to know what had happened.
While some of the pieces of the puzzle are starting to come together, Kimmel's account is a great firsthand summation of the confusion and chaos that viewers saw on their screens Sunday night. While he pledged in his Oscars sign-off that he would never return to host, we kind of hope that he gets the chance to do so, if only to enjoy a less-crazy finish than the one he witnessed. Then again, at least he's got a killer story to tell for the rest of time.
[via: Jimmy Kimmel/Twitter]