The 90th Academy Awards are set to air in less than two months, on March 4. As you might have heard, they still don’t have a host. At this point, there may be no point in courting another potential emcee only to learn he or she has some horrible skeleton in the closet (combined with an inability to sufficiently atone for said skeleton or skeletons). So guess what? As per Variety, the current plan appears to be to go hostless for the first time since the Bush I administration.
As of now, insiders tell Variety, the idea will be to coax a bunch of name talent to the stage, as a sort of revolving door series of not-quite-hosts presenting the awards. One will likely be tasked with one of the hardest gigs of the night: the opening monologue (and possible jokey montage and/or song-and-dance number).
This idea was floated back in early December, right after Kevin Hart went from last-minute host to disgraced former host in the span of about 24 hours. Hart stepped down due to furor over old homophobic jokes and tweets that were excavated right after he got the gig. The comic and actor has since repeatedly tried to address the controversy, as recently as Wednesday, with not much success. He’s officially pulled his name from the list of people who will follow the likes of Bob Hope, Billy Crystal, and David Letterman (whose much-loathed stint was actually great and very him).
A host-free Oscars is hardly a new concept. In the award behemoth’s 90 years, five ceremonies have done fine without one. There was none in 1939. For three whole years, between 1969 and 1971, there was not one emcee. The most recent was in 1989, when Rain Man took home Best Picture.
Whatever happens, the Oscars could never be as weird as Sunday’s Golden Globes, where the two Best Picture trophies went not to A Star is Born or one of last year’s several insightful films about race in America, but to an old school cheesy, fact-challenged musical biopic and a movie in which a white racist “teaches” a black man how to eat fried chicken.
(Via Variety)
