The Media Research Center’s annual awards-season meltdown continued to the Oscars, starting with a March 16 post by Elise Ehrhard:
The 98th Annual Academy Awards premiered on ABC last night and it was another left-wing awards show hate fest.
Host Conan O’Brien initially opened the show with a funny sketch, offering a brief moment of hope that this ceremony might be different than all the previous ones this season.
Satirically done up like the villain Aunt Gladys from last year’s hit horror movie Weapons, he paraded through nominated movie scenes dressed as the clownish-looking character.
But after the skit ended and his opening monologue commenced, all hope was lost for a fun night of apolitical humor.
“I should warn you tonight could get political. Okay? And if that makes you uncomfortable, there’s an alternative Oscars hosted by Kid Rock at the Dave and Buster’s down the street,” he said.
After taking a dig at half of America, he then falsely implied Trump was a pedophile, just as Trevor Noah had done at this year’s Grammy Awards.
How does Ehrhard know that implication is false? She didn’t explain. Instead, she continued to whine that Trump was a joke target:
Whenever a Democratic candidate wins the U.S. presidency, all is well in the world. Whenever a Republican wins, the world is on the brink of destruction. This has been the Hollywood mentality since Reagan’s presidency, if not earlier, and such hysteria has only grown worse.
O’Brien’s worst quip of the night was a genitalia joke at the president’s expense, saying “We’re coming to you live from the Has a Small Penis Theater. Let’s see him put his name in front of that!”
As if O’Brien was not bad enough, along came Jimmy Kimmel to present the documentary awards. Kimmel had called the United States “a ridiculous country” earlier in the evening while on the red carpet. He continued with his hostility while on stage.
“We hear a lot about courage at shows like this, but telling a story that could get you killed for telling it is real courage. As you know, there are some countries whose leaders don’t support free speech. I’m not at liberty to say which. Let’s just leave it at North Korea and CBS,” Kimmel said.
The left-wing free speech larp is infuriating when you recall how they cheered on Biden-era censorship that destroyed conservative livelihoods. It took a billionaire buying Twitter and Trump’s re-election to restore free speech rights.
Ehrhard did not name any “conservative livelihoods” that were purportedly destroyed because false and misleading claims on Twitter were called out for what they were. She went on to whine:
Kimmel later mocked the new Melania Trump documentary and added that Trump would be mad that his wife was not nominated in the Best Documentary Feature Film category. Since Melania Trump’s documentary was released in 2026 and ineligible for nomination, the joke made no sense.
Mr. Nobody Against Putin won that. Co-director David Borenstein said that the movie was “about how you lose your country, and what we saw when working with this footage is that you lose it through countless small little acts of complicity. When we act complicit, when a government murders people on the streets of our major cities when we don’t say anything, when oligarchs take over the media and control how we can produce it and consume it, we all face a moral choice.”
Under the spell of Trump Derangement Syndrome, leftists truly believe that Borenstein’s description not only applies to Russia, but also America under Trump.
Ehrhard didn’t mention what “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” was actually about — how Putin tried to control public perception of its invasion of Ukraine through the schools. Borenstein didn’t actually mention Trump, so Ehrhard decided to interpret his remarks through her right-wing, pro-Trump lens. She concluded with more whining:
The Oscar night finally ended after three very long hours and forty-four additional minutes, not that I was counting. Americans will have to wait until the Emmy Awards in September for another round of anti-American lecturing from Hollywood celebrities they barely know or care about anymore.
A couple days later, MRC executive Tim Graham went on Fox Business to whine about the awards:
Tim took aim at the “courageous” Jimmy Kimmel and the Oscar elites. While Kimmel pretends he’s a free-speech hero for comparing Donald Trump to Hitler, Graham didn’t hold back, noting that the rest of us see it for what it is: “It’s not courageous. It’s just stupid and it’s lying.”
Graham rehashed Ehrhard’s complains in his March 19 podcast:
Sunday’s Oscars telecast on ABC declined in the ratings again as the comedians — both host Conan O’Brien and presenter Jimmy Kimmel — drowned the event in a series of ridiculous anti-Trump jokes and comments.
Christian Toto of HollywoodInToto.com and MRC Video content creator Nick Kangadis take on the current state of Hollywood.
O’Brien sounded juvenile with his Trump Kennedy Center joke: “We’re coming to you live from the Has a Small Penis Theater. Let’s see him put his name in front of that!”
“As you know, there are some countries whose leaders don’t support free speech. I’m not at liberty to say which,” Kimmel said before announcing the nominees for best documentary short film. “Let’s just leave it at North Korea and CBS.”
The winner for Best Documentary argued you can lose your country to tyranny “through countless small little acts of complicity. When we act complicit when a government murders people on the streets of our major cities. When we don’t say anything when oligarchs take over the media and control how we can produce it and consume it.
Has Graham or anyone else at the MRC ever criticized a fellow right-winger for likening President Obama to Hitler? Not that we’re aware of. Graham then took a shot at the Oscars’ ratings:
Ratings for the Oscars broadcast sunk below 18 million viewers, when it used to draw 50 or 60 million. Movie stars love to have a “platform” to launch their leftist attacks, but the platform is shrinking, as half the country tunes out. The drop was the first decline in audience in five years.
This echoes the propaganda piece Craig Bannister wrote for CNS “news” a day earlier.