The 2024 Oscars were dominated by Oppenheimer, as Christopher Nolan’s latest epic ran up the statue count in most every major category of the evening, from Best Director to Best Actor to Best Picture and many more.
However, while it was a night to celebrate for Oppenheimer, other bits stole the show for the awards ceremony itself. There was Ryan Gosling’s incredible performance of “I’m Just Ken”, Al Pacino no-selling the Best Picture presentation, and John Mulaney’s hysterical presentation for Best Sound.
Mulaney took to the stage and began talking about the importance of sound editing to films, offering up maybe the first and last ever mention of Madame Web on the Oscars stage.
John Mulaney: “Without sound, we wouldn’t have been able to hear such classic lines as ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat,’ ‘I’ll have what she’s having’ and ‘He was in the Amazon with my mother when she was researching spiders just before she died.'” https://t.co/UNgGySGz3r pic.twitter.com/WLFpHIWU85
— Variety (@Variety) March 11, 2024
From there, Mulaney continued on before going off on a minute-long tangent in which he just detailed the entire plot of Field of Dreams as only he can, poking fun at the lack of any financial planning on Costner’s part to mowing down his field to build a baseball stadium and the bizarre rules of ghost baseball.
John Mulaney explaining the entire plot to Field of Dreams instead of presenting his category at the Oscars lol. king pic.twitter.com/5q98HfH5ur
— Spencer Althouse (@SpencerAlthouse) March 11, 2024
At the end, he concluded they should just give the 2024 Oscar for Best Picture to Field of Dreams, which I have to disagree with, as the correct answer of course is that this year they should’ve given the Best Picture award to Ocean’s Eleven.
The actual winners of the award Mulaney was presenting were Tarn Willers and Johnnie Burn for The Zone of Interest.