Jeff Simon: In a year when the Oscars seem ready for seething, Jimmy Kimmel may have an impossible task

Kimmel is the experienced ringmaster at Sunday’s 96th annual Oscar hoop-de-doo and it’s almost literally true that he can’t really win. Entertain, sure, but that’s about all.

On one side, a crashing bore is waiting to be born and inject tedium into America’s well-prepared living rooms, bedrooms and bars.

On another side, danger lurks in any live telecast taking place in 2024.

No one, of course, can foresee at this point that any seething Best Actor nominee might explode obscenely with resentment during a bland comedian’s joke about his wife’s filmed hairstyle, walk right up to the comic’s mic, and smack him in the face as happened two years ago.

But seasoned Oscar students know when an Oscarthon is a tinderbox of silent seethings ready to go public at the worst time.

All you need is one self-righteous Vanessa Redgrave to jauntily fling her religious politics into everything (thereby missing blatant anti-Semitism by a matter of mere inches) and you’re inviting a newly minted Paddy Chayefsky to the mic a few minutes later to suggest a few unfamiliar places where Ms. Redgrave could go.

We saw that one in yesteryear’s Oscars.

And now consider that this calendar year is not only a presidential election year where an immense audience is claiming democracy itself to be on the ballot but a place where a Middle Eastern situation with the Israelis and Hamas and Gaza veritably plead for the loosest Hollywood lips to sink a few ships rather than cling to political civility.

After which Kimmel will be designated to mop up the more painfully spilled emotional fluids from the floor and reset the show to its designated duty to set a singularly predictable and uninspiring set of awards into motion as Hollywood’s newest self-congratulation for a job that, at worst this year, was literally better than nothing. (Which, after Covid it could well have been.)

Please understand…