If you build it, he will come. And if you joke about it, he will tweet. Kevin Costner has responded to John Mulaney’s breakdown of Field of Dreams – delivered when presenting Best Sound (a surprise win for The Zone of Interest) at Sunday’s Oscars – in good-hearted fashion, saying it wasn’t a bad summary at all.
In one of the night’s funniest moments, Mulaney took a tangent after delivering some of the most iconic lines in modern movies (oh, and one from Madame Web…). One was, “If you build it, he will come” (sometimes misquoted as, “If you build it, they will come.”) from 1989’s Field of Dreams. From there, he gave a far better plot summary of Phil Alden Robinson’s movie than any VHS box could. “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.’”
Mulaney took under a minute to describe the rest of Field of Dreams: “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. But what’s weird is Timothy Busfield pushes little Gaby Hoffmann off the bleachers and she falls down and she’s unconscious.’” From there, Mulaney wonders just why Burt Lancaster’s character, Moonlight Graham, can’t return to the field after stepping over the first base line. “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.” Hey, it’s no crazier than the infidel fly rule…
The entire speech was a true highlight of the night, which, paired with his Governors Awards monologue, has prompted many to rightly call for Mulaney to host next year’s Oscars.
Field of Dreams was nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Score, losing the first two to Driving Miss Daisy and the music category to The Little Mermaid. With baseball season sliding into home in just a couple more weeks, it might be time to rewatch one of the finest sports films ever.