Tina Fey attended the Oscars on Sunday to present best production design with her longtime friend Steve Carell, but the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot star wasn’t entirely thrilled with the ceremony.
“I will say, being at the Oscars […] halfway through, I was like, ‘This is some real Hollywood bullsh–,’” Fey told Howard Stern on his SiriusXM radio show on Tuesday. “Everyone is telling me what to do. People yelling at me about rape and corporate greed, but really it’s climate change. I was like, ‘Guys, pick a lane.’ ‘We’re going to fix everything tonight.’ Also, you’re all rich. Why are you all yelling at me about corporate greed? You’re all so rich.”
Sunday’s Academy Awards broadcast was filled with calls to action from the stage, with Lady Gaga and Vice President Joe Biden taking on sexual assault, adapted screenplay winner Adam McKay calling out candidates who “take money from big banks, oil or weirdo billionaires,” and winner Leonardo DiCaprio making a plea about climate change.
Asked by Stern what she thought of DiCaprio’s speech in particular, Fey said she was impressed. “I always am psyched when someone is articulate about those things because, let’s face it, actors are very stupid,” she joked. “A lot of times when you let them talk, oof. But he’s so smart, and his speech was so cogent.”
In addition to having a seat at the Oscars, Fey also attended the famed Vanity Fair Oscars party. “I’m such small potatoes at that thing,” she said, while also explaining how the event’s photo booth worked.
“You go in a room and I think it was, like, [photographer] Mark Seliger takes your picture. And there was a gorgeous picture online the next day of Lady Gaga in the photo booth, and she’s like swirling her pants-cape or whatever it was. And the quote was like, ‘I just felt after my performance at the Oscars, I felt like a weight had been lifted, I felt like I could stop hiding.’ And I wanted to be like, ‘Ooh girl, have you been hiding? Because you’ve been doing a terrible job hiding. Because I’ve been seeing you everywhere. You’ve been hiding? Okay.’”
Fey will next be seen in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, out in theaters on Thursday.