The Academy Awards is supposed to be a night for Hollywood’s best and brightest to gather in one room to pat each other on the back for a year of hard work, acclaim, and box office glory. While that was certainly the case this year, the ceremony was missing more than a few high-profile A-listers, with Tom Cruise arguably the most notable absentee.
You’d have thought the action icon would have shown up in person given that Top Gun: Maverick being shortlisted for Best Picture marked his first nomination in almost a quarter of a century, never mind the fact he was lauded as the savior of Hollywood by unleashing the legacy sequel at exactly the right moment to ride a wave of unstoppable momentum to box office glory.
Fresh from the conspiracies claiming that Cruise may have been networking a little too much during the campaign, another set of salacious rumors have emerged to offer that the reason he may have skipped out on the Oscars was for fear of having to sit there and react on camera to jokes being pointed in his direction.
It’s an understandable conclusion to reach when Judd Apatow went out of his way to incinerate the star several times over at the recent DGA gala, but executive producer Molly McNearney – who also happens to be host Jimmy Kimmel’s wife – claimed that wasn’t the case in an interview with Variety.
“Jimmy loves Tom. Tom had just been on the show the week before. And they talked about seeing each other and Jimmy was excited to tell him that we got real Navy pilots to do the flyover at the top of the Oscars. Jimmy was really disappointed he didn’t come. We had about a three minute chunk of the monologue dedicated to Tom Cruise, honoring him and his role in reviving the movie industry. We were so disappointed when we learned a few days before the Oscars that he wouldn’t be there. Jimmy loves him and really wanted to celebrate him.”
It turns out that the opposite is true, then, with McNearney admitting that Kimmel wouldn’t have cracked an L. Ron Hubbard joke if Cruise was in attendance. The 60 year-old is on the other side of the world shooting the eighth Mission: Impossible movie anyway, so the most obvious explanation is often the right one.