Critics' Choice Awards: T.J. Miller calls Donald Trump a troll in opening monologue
Did T.J. Miller top his hilarious opening monologue from the last time he hosted the Critics’ Choice Awards? Definitely maybe.
When Miller hosted the 21st annual Critics Choice Awards, he delivered his entire opening monologue attached to four life-sized puppets, which helped set the wacky and irreverent tone for the evening. This year, Miller opened the 22nd Critics’ Choice Awards ceremony in Santa Monica with a group of whistling and dancing torsos. Once that was done, his monologue touched on everything from the movie Sully to the election results.
“Hey, trolls did well this year — not the movie, but dudes on the internet,” he said. “One them got elected president.” This was said while he stood on a literal soap box and yelled about how he wants to talk about current events, but hates it when celebrities get on their soap boxes and “tell us how to live.”
In his scattered monologue, Miller conspicuously avoided discussing his arrest on Friday. Instead, he teased the audience with fake-outs that led to asides about the news that Russia hacked the election and that it’s the 31st anniversary of A Chorus Line, and the latter led to an actual chorus line joining him onstage.
Still standing atop that soapbox, Miller concluded the monologue with a lengthy and questionably earnest statement about the division in the country: “We’re a nation that is broken and anything that is broken can be fixed,” he said, bringing up how everyone is fighting these days. “TV and film can bring us together. TV, especially, because we are one nation, one couch, one potato.”
He continued, “Movies can bring us together. We can argue until we’re blue in the face about whether or not all the jobs that he’s promised are gonna come back are gonna be automated in merely two to three years. But as soon as somebody mentions Jason Bourne, we’re all like, ‘Yeah! I love Jason Bourne! Do you like Jason Bourne? I don’t care who you voted for. Isn’t it crazy that he’s always running through the marketplace? Where’s he going? Who knows?'”
He ended the entire thing with a promise to keep his anger at bay for the night. “Let’s not be upset tonight. Tonight is a celebration. Let’s all agree, and I agree, not to be upset until next year…in February…at the Oscars.”
Watch the entire monologue above.
Here were some of the other highlights of Miller’s monologue:
Miller on Sully: “But Sully is a movie about a family of geese whose trip to New York was cut short.”
Miller on Tom Ford, who directed Nocturnal Animals: “Tom Ford not only makes movies, he also makes pants… If you want to see his movie next season, you can see it on consignment.”
Miller on the plot of Lion: “Dev [Patel], did you know that a movie like this couldn’t have been made 200 years ago because movies didn’t exist? Neither did the internet…”