Jimmy Kimmel received a Creative Arts Emmy Award for “Outstanding Variety Special (Live)” this evening for hosting the Oscars in 2023. He’s hosted a total of four times, could the shiny new statuette convince him to host a fifth?
“No, the die has been cast,” said Kimmel with a laugh.
The late-night host declined to repeat the gig at the next Academy Awards due to the time commitment preparing for Hollywood’s biggest night. Neither Kimmel nor comedian John Mulaney accepted an offer to host for 2025 with no one else confirmed as of now.
Though he did not address whether hosting duties were completely off the table indefinitely, he has previously said if he returned for next year’s celebration it would’ve been three back-to-back years which was too overwhelming for his schedule both professionally and personally.
In the meantime, Kimmel remains focused on working on his eponymous late-night show ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! as the industry landscape is rapidly changing. On Friday, it was announced that NBC’sThe Tonight Show will no longer have original episodes airing 5 nights a week. ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, CBS’ Late Show With Stephen Colbert and NBC’s Late Night With Seth Meyers already scaled back to four nights of originals a week starting this season.
“As a group, we have a text chain of all the late-night hosts and we sent all of our congratulations to Jimmy Fallon for getting Friday off,” Kimmel shared backstage. “There is no future for late-night,” he added as the room erupted with laughter.
In an acceptance speech Reynolds shared on social media, he appears dressed as Deadpool, holding Hugh Jackman’s broken Emmy.
“Wow, an Emmy, what an incredible honor,” McElhenney starts saying in the acceptance speech “There’s so many people to thank. I’ve been waiting for this moment for 16 years. So I’ve got a lot to say. I’d like to start by thanking—”
Reynolds then interrupts McElhenney and says, “Mr. Lively couldn’t be here to accept this broken Emmy so he sent me on his behalf. First and foremost, Wrexham, we love you. Thank you for letting Rob and the other guy tell your story. Cymru am byth [Wales forever], bitches.”
He continued, “I’d also like to thank the Academy for this honor and for not asking us to attend the televised awards show with the real celebrities. I’d also like to thank FX and Disney for their support and in exchange, Mr. Lively promises to not f*** up my next movie.”
Reynolds ended his speech by calling out the Oscars, adding, “You’re on notice motherf***ers. Maybe we can get a token VFX nod next year. The amount of work on Hugh and Ryan’s face alone is at least worth a nod.”
Watch the complete acceptance speech in the video posted below.
The prize, voted on by a special jury, was shared by director-producer Alex Pritz, producers Darren Aronofsky, Sigrid Dyekjær, Will N. Miller, Gabriel Uchida, and Lizzie Gillett, and executive producer Txai Suruí. Their film centers on the Indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people, who face constant assault as they try to protect their territory within Brazil’s Amazon rainforest from invasion by outsiders. As Deadline previously wrote about the film, those invaders are “engaged in burning down great swaths of the rainforest for mining, logging, clearing land for cattle and homesteading.”
The film also underscores what’s at stake with each acre of Brazilian rainforest that goes up in smoke — it is the ecological health of the Earth that hangs in the balance.
Director-producer Alex Pritz and E.P. Txai Suruí
Courtesy of Alex Pritz
“To receive the recognition of our peers, alongside such an incredible group of nominees, is an unbelievable honor,” Pritz told Deadline after his Emmy win. “We share this award with communities around the world who are standing up in defense of our planet’s continued habitability and fighting for a better future.”
Among those who attended the Creative Arts Emmy Awards ceremony Sunday night were Neidinha Bandeira, a defender of the Uru-eu-wau-wau who is one of the main characters in the documentary. She previously told Deadline, “The Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous territory is important for the whole planet, because of its nature and biodiversity and because it’s fighting climate change.”
Bitaté Uru-eu-wau-wau, an emerging leader of his Indigenous group, also attended the Emmy ceremony. He participated in the film and has taken an active role teaching his people how to shoot and edit video so that they can be better represented in media narratives about their land.
Bitaté Uru-eu-wau-wau in ‘The Territory’
National Geographic
In an interview with Deadline last year, Bitaté said of The Territory, “It brings to the forefront the fight of my people. It displays for the world the situation we live in. We know that the challenge that we face — that we have always faced in our territory — is being represented now to the world beyond Brazil. People are talking about it. I feel very good about that.” He added, “We are also calling on the government of Brazil to protect all of our regions and our communities. We need help not only here in my community, but throughout all of our Indigenous territories.”
The Territory features exceptional photography, both aerials allowing viewers to see how much of the rainforest is being chewed up, and the life that exists under the remaining canopy, down to the almost imperceptible movements of insects.
A fire lit by local farmers burns in the Amazon rainforest.
Alex Pritz/National Geographic/Everett Collection
“I really wanted visually to be able to move between the big and the small, because this story is about the climate and about the planet and these really huge forces, the rise of populist authoritarianism and these huge themes — manifest destiny,” Pritz told Deadline previously. “But it’s also about the individual characters… and we wanted to make a film that was able to move between the macro level forces and the micro level people and regional conflicts that encapsulates it. Trying to build a visual language where we can move between satellite imagery of the continent where you see, over 30 years, how many trees have been lost and what this really looks like and then go all the way down to like one caterpillar and really just focus on that.”
Fellow nominees in the Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking category included Last Flight Home, directed and produced by Ondi Timoner and produced by David Turner; The Accused: Damned Or Devoted?, directed and produced by Mohammed Ali Naqvi, and Aftershock, directed and produced by Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee.
According to the TV Academy, the purpose of the Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking Award “is to both honor and encourage profound social impact, significant innovation of form, and remarkable mastery of filmmaking technique.” As the TV Academy’s rules note, “All applicants for candidacy in this juried award [are] required to submit a written statement that expresses the program’s qualifications as a Documentary Film with Exceptional Merit.”
