Jimmy Fallon isn't known for his engagement in political discourse—just the opposite, in fact. He hosted the Golden Globes one week before Donald Trump's inauguration, and he did very little to win back some of his detractors after the infamous hair tousle on The Tonight Show. Thankfully, the show didn't suffer because of him because the celebrities came prepared to use their time behind the podium to speak out against Trump.
In less than a week, Jimmy Kimmel will host what many anticipate to be the most political Academy Awards in recent memory. It will be the finale of a awards season that saw protest performances at the Grammys and grand speeches by nearly every winner at the SAG Awards. And in an interview ahead of Kimmel's big hosting night, the host doesn't appear to have much planned in regards to Trump.
As he told The Hollywood Reporter:
I don't know where we'll be mentally on Feb. 26. I don't know if we'll feel like we're past that stuff or if there will be some new crazy thing we're all talking about—my guess is that there will probably be some new crazy thing we're all talking about, so it really depends largely on what's going on that week. And I would definitely make those decisions the day of or day before as to how much material I do and what my spin on it is.
But that's not the only hint in the interview that he might play things safe on Oscar night. He also tells THR that the Academy Awards are more Republican than people think.
It depends on the speech, you know? I think that you've got a group of people who are largely very liberal, although I will say, the first time I hosted the Emmys, I had a joke about there being no Republicans in the room, and a surprisingly big group of people clapped when I asked if there were Republicans, and I was a little bit thrown by it. So I don't think the audience in its entirety is as liberal as people in Middle America imagine it is. But the celebrities, most of them are pretty liberal. If I was nominated and I was going to stand on that stage, I think I'd be intimidated by how good Meryl Streep's [Golden Globes] speech was, so I'd probably keep my mouth shut when it comes down to it.
What this sounds like is that he's going to leave the political talk to the celebrities. Which works, as we've seen in other award shows this season. Kimmel isn't afraid to get political—earlier this month he had a hilarious short imagining what Trump TV would be like—but he tends to take a goofy look at current events compared to the harsher critiques of his peers in late night.
It's too bad, really, that the Academy didn't choose a host like Jon Stewart, Chris Rock, or even Alec Baldwin. But even if Kimmel himself attempts political humor, he'd be smart to leave the serious remarks from the celebrities themselves. At the Oscars—one of the most-watched TV events of the year—Kimmel can probably stick to his goofiness (and his ongoing "feud" with Matt Damon) and leave the serious subjects to the Oscar winners who may in fact choose to use their limited time at the podium to make a statement about the ever-changing world around us.
