Did The Oscars Really Raise $65,243 On Girl Scout Cookies? Producers Reveal The Truth

While we’re all still reeling from Leonardo DiCaprio’s long-awaited win for best actor, many Oscar watchers might have forgotten that host Chris Rock used the grand stage to help his daughters sell Girl Scout Cookies. However, despite the stunt yielding a decent chunk of change for the organization, it’s been confirmed that it wasn’t quite the vast total that Rock boasted on the night of the awards.

Rock went through the rows of attendees asking celebs to support the cause, and later brought the Girl Scouts on stage to unveil a tote board showing that the room had collectively bought a whopping $65,243 worth of cookies. If that number sounds way too high to be real, that’s because it is. Despite all the successful people in the room that night, selling more than $65,000 worth of cookies in one sitting is pretty much an impossible task, as confirmed by the show’s producers Reginald Hudlin and David Hill.

“It came from a proper family moment, and it had a comedic payoff,” Hill told The Hollywood Reporter. “There’s no way that [the $65,000 total] was it. It was part of a comedy bit, and I don’t think anyone saw it as anything but.” To hit that total, People reported, the girls would have had to unload around 16,000 boxes of cookies.

People reports that stars including Mindy Kaling, Kate Winslet, Christian Bale, Tina Fey and even Vice President Joe Biden bought at least one box each, contributing to an actual take of about $2,500 -- still a decent amount of money raised for a good cause, a rep for the Girl Scouts told TMZ. In addition to the Girl Scouts of Inglewood, California, getting the money from the planned comedy bit, Hudlin mentioned that it was a thrill for them to be at the show.

“And the great thing, I know from talking to my family who was in the audience, everyone was very grateful to get those cookies. My son and daughter were handing them out to all the celebrities sitting around them, they were cutting deals with Mindy Kaling and several superheroes,” he said. “And everyone now wants Girl Scout Cookies more than ever, so I predict their numbers will be up.”

Even Linda Dunn has to be happy about that. The woman Rock mentioned that his daughters keep getting beat by in cookie sales every year is the mom of a girl in his daughters' Girl Scout troop in New York, and she was fine with getting beat this way.

“90 million people watch the Oscars,” she told Access Hollywood. “You can’t buy that type of publicity for the Girl Scouts. That was a wonderful thing that he did.”