U.S. President Donald Trump said the Oscar ceremony wouldn’t have screwed up the Best Picture announcement so badly if Hollywood wasn’t so focused on attacking him.
Trump said the Academy Awards should have focused more on organizing the show, in an interview with Breitbart.
“I think they were focused so hard on politics that they didn’t get the act together at the end,” President Trump told the website.
The show, which aired Sunday night, will go down in history for flubbing the main event when the wrong movie was called up to accept the award for Best Picture.
The crew of La La Land had to stop their speeches early to hand the award to Moonlight.
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“It was a little sad,” Trump told Breitbart. “It took away from the glamour of the Oscars. It didn’t feel like a very glamorous evening. I’ve been to the Oscars. There was something very special missing, and then to end that way was sad.”
Breitbart, an alt-right news media website, used to be run by Steve Bannon. Bannon is now serving as Trump’s chief strategist.
The president was a frequent topic during the Oscars. Host Jimmy Kimmel started off the show by thanking Trump for making the Oscars seem less racist, referring to the #OscarsSoWhite controversy over the past couple of years.
He also said Trump was probably going to be on Twitter, and used the opportunity to contact him via social media.
Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for The Salesman — who boycotted the Oscars and sent a NASA engineer to accept the award in his place – also took the opportunity to slam Trump’s (now-suspended) travel ban, which barred travellers and refugees from Iran, as well as six other Muslim-majority countries.
“My absence is out of respect for the people of my country and those of other six nations whom have been disrespected by the inhumane law that bans entry of immigrants to the U.S,” Iranian-American Anousheh Ansari said on Farhadi’s behalf.
WATCH: Iranian filmmaker wins Oscar, blasts Trump travel ban in statement
The president has criticized the Oscars in the past.
In February 2015, Trump complained that the Oscars ceremony was “absolutely terrible” and “boring” and suggested the “perfect host for next year: Me.”
Trump’s interview with Breitbart also included topics such as healthcare, immigration and more, the article stated.
The 32.9 million viewers tuning into Sunday’s Academy Awards represented a drop-off of more than a million from last year and Oscar’s smallest audience since 2008.
*with a file from Reuters
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