By Maxine Bass
Conan O’Brien makes his hosting debut at the 96th annual Academy Awards
The Oscar race is on, and this year’s edition of the Academy Awards caps off a banner year at the movies. This year’s ceremony also marks the hosting debut of Conan O’Brien, whose stint as a late-night host lasted from 1993 until 2021, spanning three different shows: Late Night with Conan O’Brien, his TBS talk show Conan, and a brief-yet-controversial stint hosting The Tonight Show.
“We are thrilled and honoured to have the incomparable Conan O’Brien host the Oscars this year” said Academy CEO Bill Kramer and president Janet Yang in a joint statement. “He is the perfect person to help lead our global celebration of film with his brilliant humour, his love of movies and his live TV expertise.”
O’Brien offered a statement of his own, offering a teaser of the signature brand of quirky comedy viewers will see on Oscar night. “America demands it and now it is happening: Taco Bell’s new Cheesy Chalupa Supreme,” he quipped. “In other news, I’m hosting the Oscars.”
O’Brien’s hosting debut takes place during a particularly unique year in the awards’ 97-year history, with an array of mini-scandals not seen since disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein began to play dirty with Oscar campaigning back in the 1990s.
The scandal at the forefront of this year’s Oscars involves Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón, star of acclaimed musical Emilia Pérez. That film leads this year’s race, with 13 nominations, with Gascón considered a frontrunner for Best Actress for her portrayal of a transgender Mexican drug lord. That status, however, is now on shaky ground after some wildly offensive tweets from a few years ago resurfaced, stirring up controversy for the first-ever trans performer to receive an Oscar nomination. The situation has become so dire, in fact, that the film’s director, Jacques Audiard, is no longer speaking to his film’s star, while Netflix has abandoned its campaign for Best Actress and shifted the focus to the film’s other 12 nominations.
Meanwhile, the Best Actress race is easily this year’s most competitive, with the award to be presented by last year’s winner, Emma Stone. In addition to Gascón, another top contender in that category is Cynthia Erivo, who portrayed green-skinned Elphaba in Wicked.
Meanwhile, there are also several first-time nominees gaining heat: Demi Moore, who dazzled in the bonkers Hollywood horror satire The Substance; Fernanda Torres in the Brazilian drama I’m Still Here; and Mikey Madison, best known for the FX dramedy Better Things before electrifying audiences as an exotic dancer in Anora (Madison, by the way, found herself in the midst of her own mini-scandal when she was criticized for not using an intimacy co-ordinator for the film’s explicit sex scenes).
On the male side of the equation, the Best Actor category is likewise loaded with memorable performances. Nominees in for that award are: Timothée Chalamet as a scruffy young Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown; Adrien Brody as a Holocaust survivor and tortured architect in The Brutalist; Colman Domingo as a convict who joins a prison theatre troupe in Sing Sing; Ralph Fiennes as a Vatican cardinal navigating the election of a new pope in Conclave; and Sebastian Stan as 1980s-era Donald Trump in The Apprentice.
THE OSCARS air Sunday, March 2, on CTV & ABC at 8 p.m.