Trump says Oscars focused hard on politics before ‘sad’ end

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump is giving Sunday’s Academy Awards two thumbs down, calling the botched ending “sad.”

The president said in an interview with Breitbart News on Monday that the Academy Awards “focused so hard on politics that they didn’t get the act together at the end.” Pointing to the flubbed awarding of “Moonlight” as the Oscar-winning best picture after initially giving the prize to “La La Land,” Trump said, “to end that way was sad.”

The president was attending a Governors’ Ball at the White House for most of Sunday’s awards ceremony. The annual Oscars ceremony carried a political edge throughout the evening, with many winners, presenters and host Jimmy Kimmel taking digs at Trump.

Trump, who was photographed at the Oscars in 2011, said the ceremony “didn’t feel like a very glamorous evening.” He said the event “was a little sad. It took away from the glamour of the Oscars.”

The president has been critical of the Oscars before. In February 2015, he complained that the Oscars ceremony was “absolutely terrible” and “boring” and suggested the “perfect host for next year: Me.”

At the end of Sunday’s ceremony, presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway apparently took the wrong envelope onto the stage for best picture and mistakenly read “La La Land” as the winner. Kimmel came forward to inform the cast that “Moonlight” had won the prize.

The 32.9 million viewers tuning into Sunday’s Academy Awards represented a drop-off of more than a million from last year and Oscar’s smallest audience since 2008.

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AP Television Writer Frazier Moore contributed to this report.