“Let’s name some names,” John Mulaney said, a few minutes into his monologue with co-host Nick Kroll at the 2018 Independent Spirit Awards on Saturday.
Unlike Jimmy Kimmel, who has hedged about how much he will address the #MeToo and Times’s Up movements at tomorrow night’s Oscars, the hosts of the lower-profile Spirit Awards, honoring the type of independent cinema with which Harvey Weinstein was once synonymous, went all-in.
They began with Weinstein, who Mulaney said once told him his gravestone would say Project Runway instead of Pulp Fiction. “Don’t worry. It’s not going to say Project Runway anymore,” Mulaney joked. “It’s going to say ‘XXL Unmarked Grave.’”
ADVERTISEMENT
Moving on to accused harasser Brett Ratner, Kroll told a story about watching him scratch his balls and then touch six different donuts on a craft services table. “So I’m thinking, if that’s how the guy treats donuts…” he said, letting that image hang in the air.
“Now, people keep asking, can we separate the art from the man?” Mulaney asked.
“Like with Kevin Spacey, can we still love K-Pax?” Kroll added.
“And what about Woody Allen and his last 20 unwatchable movies?” Mulaney wondered. “Can I still not watch them? Or must I reevaluate them based on these new allegations that were a matter of public record 30 years ago?”
From there, they broke down the art of the male apology, including the one from their fellow stand-up comic Louis C.K., who talked about how much the women he harassed “admired” him. “Whoa,” Mulaney said. “That’s like if a guy shit his pants and then to fix the problem put on cufflinks.”
The accused then started beginning their apologies with the phrase, “Like many men...” Or as Mulaney put it, “Like many men, I’m only now learning that women don’t like it when you run at them fully erect with hate in your eyes. This is new to me, I’m here to listen.”
Kroll remarked that we reached the “auteur level of apologies” with chef Mario Batali, who infamously ended his apology with a recipe for cinnamon rolls. “Mamma mia, that’s a spicy apology!” he said, offering up an Italian chef’s kiss.
Left off their list of alleged predators was James Franco, who was a Spirit Award nominee for The Disaster Artist but did not show up to the event and lost his category to Call Me by Your Name’s Timothée Chalamet. But in every other respect, they did not hold back on Hollywood’s long-overdue wake-up call.
Even if Jimmy Kimmel tries, it’s going to be hard to top that.
