Jimmy Kimmel ended up having to return to the stage during the Best Picture acceptance speeches to issue the strangest correction in Oscar history. | AP Photo Kimmel roasts Trump at mixed-up Academy Awards He also paid tribute to the 'overrated' Meryl Streep in a ceremony that ended with the wrong film being named best picture.

Academy Awards host Jimmy Kimmel told a worldwide audience Sunday night he was awaiting President Donald Trump's tweets in response to the Oscar ceremony — after calling the president racist in his opening monologue and implying that hundreds of countries "now hate us."

The high-energy ceremony ended, oddly enough, with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway reading the wrong film's name for the winner for Best Picture. As the cast and crew of "La La Land" was basking in the glow of victory, the mistake was corrected and the award was then correctly presented to "Moonlight," sparking a rapid-fire run of Twitter jokes about one of the president's favorite phrases: "fake news."


Kimmel had joked earlier: "We have no tolerance for fake news. Fake tans we love, but fake news?" It was a quip that he might well have regretted by the end of the night.

Early in the show, politics took center stage as Kimmel launched his monologue.

"The country is divided right now," the late-night talk-show host said during his opening remarks on ABC's telecast. The comedian went on to say that he was asked to "say something to unite us."

"I can't do that, there's only one 'Braveheart' in this room, and he's not going to unite us either," Kimmel joked, as the camera turned to Mel Gibson.

"I'm not the man to unite this country," Kimmel said, adding there were millions and millions of people watching the award show at the moment. He urged everyone watching to "have a positive considerate conversation not as liberals or conservatives but as Americans – if we all did that it would make America great again. It starts with us."

Looking down to the front row, Kimmel also pointed out the "highly overrated" Meryl Streep — a dig at Trump who tweeted insults about the actress following a Golden Globes speech where she highlighted the importance of journalism in a divisive political age.

Streep was nominated for her 20th Academy Award (she lost to Emma Stone of "La La Land"), and Kimmel jokingly cited some of her earlier "overrated" work such as "Sophie's Choice" and "The Deer Hunter."

"Nice dress, by the way,” Kimmel said to Streep, after asking her to stand up so everyone could give her a round of applause. “Is that an Ivanka?”

Taking a hit at #OscarsSoWhite, which trended last year amid complaints about the lack of diversity among actors and movies that were honored, Kimmel said: "I want to say thank you to President Trump. Remember last year when it seemed like the Oscars are racist?"

Kimmel also took a swipe at Friday's press gaggle with White House press secretary Sean Spicer, at which outlets like POLITICO, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and BuzzFeed News were not allowed to participate.

While introducing Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs, Kimmel said she is "a rare president, a president who believes in both arts and sciences."

During her speech, Boone Isaacs celebrated diversity in the arts that spans across borders.

"Tonight is proof, that art has no borders, that art doesn't have a single language," she said. "all creative artists around the world are connected by an unbreakable bond that is powerful and permanent."

Politics also was sprinkled as a subtext into a number of the presentations and acceptance speeches. That was true all the way until the end, when Hollywood veterans Beatty and Dunaway — marking the 50th anniversary of "Bonnie and Clyde" — mistakenly presented the Oscar for the year's best picture to "La La Land" instead of "Moonlight," the actual winner. The mistake was caught as the producers of "La La Land" gave their speeches.

Sometimes politics moved directly to the forefront.

Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, whose film "The Salesman" won in the Best Foreign Language Film category, had previously announced he planned boycot the ceremony. Farhadi's stand was due to Trump's travel ban that limited those from seven Muslim-majority countries, including Iran, from coming to the U.S. The ban is currently not in place, and the Trump administration has said it is working on a replacement.

"I'm sorry I'm not with you tonight, my absence is out of respect for the people of my country," Farhadi said in a statement read at the ceremony. "Dividing the world into the 'us' and 'our enemies' category, creates fear."

In his statement, Farhadi also said that directors have a chance to "create empathy between us and others, and empathy that we need today."

Actor Dev Patel then introduced Sting, who sang an original song created for a film about American journalist James Foley, who was beheaded in 2014 by ISIS. Patel said it is "a time where journalists around the world are under attack."

At the end of Sting's performance, a quote from Foley was pictured on stage: "If I don't have the moral courage to challenge authority. ... we don't have journalism."

Later, Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal made a statement against Trump's proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

"As a Mexican, as a Latin American, as a migrant worker, and as a human being, I'm against any form of wall that wants to separate us."

David Cohen contributed to this report.