Ricky Gervais swipes Oscars for injecting political commentary: 'I ... tried to warn them'
By Joseph A. Wulfsohn | Fox News
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Ricky Gervais knocked this year's Oscars ceremony for the abundance of political and social commentary that made headlines on Hollywood's biggest night.
Gervais received plenty of praise on social media as host of this year's Golden Globes for his scathing monologue slamming the entertainment industry for its hypocritical virtue signaling.
"If you do win an award tonight, don't use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg," Gervais told the crowd of A-listers. "So if you win, come up, accept your award, thank your agent, thank your God, and f--- off."
However, his words of advice became ancient history on Sunday night as Oscar winners and presenters invoked politically charged topics like President Trump's impeachment, health care, and climate change.
Gervais took to Twitter on Monday and sounded off on the ceremony.
"I have nothing against the most famous people in the world using their privileged, global platform to tell the world what they believe. I even agree with most of it. I just tried to warn them that when they lecture everyday, hard working people, it has the opposite effect. Peace," the "Office" creator tweeted.
ABC's politically charged Oscar telecast averaged 23.6 million viewers on Sunday night, the smallest audience ever, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
THR noted that total was “well below the 29.56 million and 7.7 for last year's awards,” and down 20 percent in year-to-year viewers. The Oscars managed a 5.3 rating in the key demographic of adults age 18-49, down 31 percent from last year’s 7.7 demo rating.
The lengthy, host-less broadcast fell almost 2 million viewers short of the previous all-time low, when the Oscars averaged 26.54 million viewers back in 2018.
Several winners injected politics into the Academy Awards, starting with the telecast's first famous victor, Brad Pitt, who took a shot at Republican senators who voted against calling witnesses at President Trump’s impeachment trial.
“They told me I only have 45 seconds up here, which is 45 seconds more than the Senate gave John Bolton this week,” Pitt said. “I’m thinking maybe Quentin [Tarantino] does a movie about it. In the end, the adults do the right thing.”
Pitt was not the only actor to politicize his comments as Joaquin Phoenix used his lengthy, emotional best actor acceptance speech to discuss, among other things, the state of humanity and the plight of cows.
"We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow," Phoenix said. "And when she gives birth, we steal her baby even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable and then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal."
Even socialist revolutionary Karl Marx was quoted in a speech by Julia Reichert, the co-director of the Barack and Michelle Obama-produced best feature-length documentary winner "American Factory," about a factory that opened in Ohio. She ended her speech with: “Workers of the world, unite!”
