He knocked it out of the … theater?
Kevin Costner officially responded to John Mulaney’s take of his 1989 movie “Field of Dreams” after the comedian poked fun at the baseball flick during the 2024 Oscars.
“Not a bad summary, @johnmulaney.,” the “Yellowstone” actor, 69, commented on a now-deleted Instagram Story. “Congrats to all the nominees and winners at @theacademy Awards Sunday night.”
The two-time Oscar winner later took to X (formerly Twitter) and reposted the clip with the message: “Not a bad summary.”
Mulaney’s comedic bit came in the middle of the prestigious award ceremony when the funnyman, 41, took the stage in LA’s Dolby Theater to announce the winner for Best Sound.
“For years, movies didn’t have sound, and then they figured it out,” Mulaney began in a seemingly normal speech. “Some people say that the silent era was the golden era of film — these people are difficult and insane.”
“Without sound we wouldn’t have been able to hear such classic lines as ‘You’re going to need a bigger boat,’ ‘I’ll have what she’s having’ and ‘He was in the Amazon with my mother when she was researching spiders just before she died,’” Mulaney continued, referencing “Jaws,” “When Harry Met Sally” and “Madame Web.”
“Or what about that moment in ‘Field of Dreams’ where we hear, ‘If you build it, he will come,’ and then Costner does it, he builds a baseball field,” Mulaney continued in his unhinged speech.
“Or I guess he doesn’t build it — he mows down corn, and then there is a field and he’s like, ‘I’m going to watch ghosts play baseball,’ and the bank is like, ‘You wanna pay your mortgage?’ And he’s like, ‘Nah, I’m gonna watch ghosts play baseball.’”
It’s at that point, things started to spiral.
“And then he finds James Earl Jones, who wrote ‘The Boat Rocker,’ which I thought was a real book deep into my 20s, and he’s like, ‘People will come, Ray,’ — he’s the only one with a financial plan,” Mulaney added. “But what’s weird is Timothy Busfield pushes little Gaby Hoffmann off the bleachers and she falls down and she’s unconscious.”
“[Burt Lancaster as Moonlight Graham] comes up and he pats her on the back a couple of times and he’s like, ‘Hot dog, stuck in the throat,’ and then he can’t go back in the game,” Mulaney rambled.
“Because I guess there’s a rule in ghost baseball that if you leave the field at any point to become an elderly ghost and do the Heimlich maneuver, you can’t return to the field.”
After his long-winded speech, Mulaney revealed that the winner of the category went to “The Zone of Interest,” which also won Best International Feature.
“Field of Dreams” has a history with the Academy, too. The sports drama won four Oscars.
In 2021, the “Bodyguard” actor took part in a real-life “Field of Dreams” MLB game very close to the film’s original set in Dyersville, Iowa.
During a pre-game interview, the actor told reporters how important the piece of cinema was to him.
“I’m moved by it. I am,” Costner said at the time. “Somewhere along the line, if you have some unfinished business, that movie starts to take over.”