Oscar presenters are totally hit and miss. You can ruin a beautiful Star Wars lineup like Mark Hamill, Oscar Isaac, and Kelly Marie Tran by making them tell BB-8 jokes. You can have Matthew McConaughey having a deer-in-the-headlights moment as he tensely rattles off facts about editing. Or you can have Lupita Nyong’o and Kumail Nanjiani absolutely killing it by paying homage to all sorts of dreamers in their short intro.
But Nyong’o and Nanjiani might have been upstaged by the dynamic duo of Tiffany Haddish and Maya Rudolph, who rejuvenated the show after Jimmy Kimmel dragged a bunch of stars out to give snacks to the regular people across the street, interrupting their preview screening of A Wrinkle In Time in the process. Kimmel’s “regular guy” pick from the crowd massacred Haddish’s name on the first try as he introduced them, but the two women barely blinked as they surged ahead to command the stage, carrying their extremely high and obviously uncomfortable shoes.
Best of all, Haddish was wearing that dress—you know, the Alexander McQueen one she wore during her SNL monologue that she said cost more than her mortgage, so why shouldn’t she wear it again? No reason why at all, it looks amazing on her.
First, they joked about how the days of #OscarsSoWhite might have given way to #OscarsSoBlack, and reassured the crowd that there were still many white people at the Oscars, not just the stars, but people behind the scenes with clipboards and wearing headsets as well.
Then the two stars commended each other on Haddish’s public urination scene in Girls Trip and Rudolph’s public defecation scene in Bridesmaids, commenting, “And look where we are now!” Haddish even called out to Meryl Streep, who she’s pushing to get cast as her mother in Girls Trip 2. Rudolph’s deadpan worked perfectly against Haddish’s dynamic energy: These two should definitely get cast in a buddy movie. Perhaps one written by Rudolph’s husband and No. 1 Tiffany Haddish fan Paul Thomas Anderson?