WTF was up with Jimmy Kimmel's 'Lion King' bit?

Oh, the Oscars: where the moments of brilliance (hi, Mahershala Ali and Viola Davis) are the diamonds in Jimmy Kimmel’s very, very rough.

One of the rougher moments was a tone-deaf bit where the late night host interviewed the impossibly cute Indian child actor Sunny Pawar. In a painfully awkward transition, Kimmel pivoted from Lion, the movie in which Pawar stars, to The Lion King.

Then Kimmel puts his grubby white paws on Pawar and lifts him up, like a lion cub, presumably, but like a prop, actually.

The optics were cringeworthy: one of the few brown people in the room becoming the visual punchline to a cringeworthy joke about an African lion cub. Interesting how somehow, the equally impossibly-cute Jacob Tremblay was spared this treatment at last year’s Oscars.

Don’t do this.