I’ll be watching The Academy Awards Sunday night. This isn’t a monumental statement. I watch every year, whether I’ve seen the nominated movies or not.
I have not seen many this year. Is that my fault or theirs? Doesn’t matter, I watch for other reasons. Mainly: the host.
I am a big host supporter. I thought the movement to go host-less for a few years there (’19 through ’21) was among the most idiotic trends in TV and movie history. Just depending on the movies themselves, when many in recent years have been arthouse-y favorites of cineastes, was a sure way to tamp down wide viewer interest.
Quick shots of Meryl Streep and Leo DiCaprio sitting in the audience staring straight ahead are not intrinsically entertaining.
But when a host is truly good, viewers stay on alert for inventiveness, for surprises, for something different from the march of presenters struggling with hokey gag lines written for them. Which they sometimes misread from the teleprompters because they don’t want to use their glasses.
That’s one reason why an experienced late-night host is always an ideal choice for the Oscar-cast. Late-night hosts come prepared to entertain, they know how to perform a monologue, and they’re quick enough on their feet to make a memorable moment—like Jimmy Kimmel’s killer comeback to Trump’s sneering mid-show review last year.
So here’s to The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for reaching out to a late-night Hall of Famer to pick up the mantle this year. Conan O’Brien all by himself is reason enough to put in the three-hour (plus?) trek to Best Picture.
Television has greatly missed the one-of-a-kind comedy voice that O’Brien unleashed on late-night three decades ago. He has done fine work on his podcast and his Max travel series, but where has Conan the Host Man gone?
Expect him to be back, in a fully realized version, Sunday night.
Conan’s plans for the show have been closely guarded, though it was revealed in a New York Times profile yesterday that he’s brought ten of his writers along to work with the usual Oscar crew.
This is excellent news. Conan writers were always a separate and distinct subset of the conventional late-night writing staff, emerging from the storeroom where they kept the broken toys.
Over the years, his roster included names like Jonathan Groff, Mike Sweeney, Allison Silverman, Brian Stack, and of course Robert Smigel, who also performed such memorable characters as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s and Bill Clinton’s lips on “Clutch Cargo” segments and the canine icon, Triumph the Insult Comic dog.
Where else but on Conan could anyone watch such classic bits, as well as “Satellite TV Channels,” including the unforgettable “Yearlong Spit Take Channel” and “Potato Judge Channel?”
Fans, of course, would be delighted if he reprised a few of those classic bits for the Oscar show, but no matter what he does, he’s certain to inject some of the same creativity he brought to his three late-night iterations.
He is definitely taking the gig seriously. During an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! this week, he was looking fit and energetic. Energized Conan is a comedy whirlwind, as he proved last year in his on-fire (literally) appearance on Hot Ones.
With Kimmel, he promised “fun ideas” and “great surprises.” A must.
In the Times interview he claimed not to have finalized his plans, even for the show’s opening bit. Which, got to say, seems unlikely. Conan openings, from that first all but hanging himself at the prospect of succeeding Letterman bit on his Late Night premiere, to running across the entire United States on his Tonight Show premiere, have been elaborate, well-thought-out, and often extensively pre-taped extravaganzas.
As for the monologue, again, credit to The Academy for timing, though it may have been sheer luck on their part. No Oscars has ever aired during a more fraught or divided point in American History (Civil War late-night comedy consisted mainly of juggling bowie knives by candlelight).
Given Hollywood’s prevailing point of view, and efforts from the White House to impose its own ideas of what cultural events are and aren’t acceptable in its version of America, there might be some ugliness alongside the klieg lights in the air Sunday night.
Conan was never a polemical comic. He addressed the political topics of the day, but usually without open rage or disgust. He told The Times he won’t shrink from politically charged material (he would know that would play as playing safe, and safe is not the space he has operated in), but he will try to thread that needle as he has in the past.
If it works as planned, whatever the night’s political jokes are won’t be the highlight of the show anyway. It will have to be something much more unexpected, more inventive, more distinctively Conan.
No offense to Timothee Chalamet or the Wicked witches, but that’s the best reason to look forward to another long night of “what’s that one about?” at the Oscars.
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