Thank goodness the Oscars didn’t have a host. They were bad enough this year without one, with the biggest highlights being brief interludes: Chris Evans’ Captain America moment, the Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper duet, and an Oscar presentation by comedians Awkwafina and John Mulaney.
For about two seconds last December, Kevin Hart was going to host the Oscars. Within days of his announcement, however, he was ambushed by the woke brigades for tweets from a decade ago, for which he had already apologized. After receiving an ultimatum from the academy — apologize or step down — Hart announced in an Instagram post that because he had already apologized before the week’s viral outrage, he would let someone else host. “We feed Internet trolls and reward them,” he said. “I’m not going to do it, man.”
After the #OscarsSoWhite controversy of 2015 and 2016, it wasn’t a great look for the academy to disinvite a black host. This may have been why it chose to proceed with Hollywood’s biggest night hostless, but the Hart scandal might actually have resulted in the night’s biggest win. For a few reasons, the Oscars were better off without a host.
1. Maya Rudolph, Tina Fey, and Amy Poehler
The three comedians opened the show with a short skit that served as an unintentional reminder of the uninspired humor we got to miss out on without a host to dish it out. From Rudolph’s obligatory Trump dig to Tina Fey’s exaggerated one-liner (“’Roma’s’ on Netflix? What’s next, my microwave makes a movie?”), these normally funny ladies proved that the suffocating culture of the Oscars turns even comedic personalities bland.
2. The shorter runtime
The 2018 Oscars were close to four hours long, while Sunday night’s awards clocked in at just over three hours and 15 minutes. When viewers already have to endure rambling acceptance speeches and almost half an hour of walking, any ploy to speed up the best picture reveal is welcome. The Wall Street Journal estimates that the host takes up about 25.5 minutes of an Oscars broadcast. With the banality that was this year’s Oscars, no one seemed to mind the extra half hour of sleep.
3. Spike Lee
Not having a host kept the political commentary, if not to a minimum, at least to an individual diatribe here and there. Spike Lee’s incoherent acceptance speech for best adapted screenplay for “BlacKkKlansman” ended with the type of political messaging that a host would’ve capitalized on: “The 2020 presidential election is around the corner. Let’s all mobilize, let’s all be on the right side of history. Make the moral choice between love versus hate. Let’s do the right the thing! You Know I had to get that in there.”
Lee doesn’t know how to keep his movies short either (“BlacKkKlansman” clocks in at two hours, 16 minutes), and just like the good jokes that suffer under a political agenda, none of his co-screenwriters had a chance to speak.
The Oscars could have benefited from much more Awkwafina and John Mulaney, but, as the yearly snubs for comedic films remind us, the Academy isn’t supposed to award humor. This may be why non-host Mulaney delivered the most self-aware quip of the night: “I want these people to like me to a degree that I find embarrassing.” The Oscars themselves want desperately to be liked, and viewers seemed to appreciate their decision to scrap the host. If only the academy could do away with more of its messaging as well.
