Conan O’Brien Will Host the 2025 Academy Awards
The 2025 Oscars ceremony was able to check off multiple boxes today, revealing it had located both a host for the broadcast and filled its need for a lanky, red-haired presence on stage with the announcement that comedian Conan O’Brien will be taking on the gig for the first time. Following two years of the ceremony being hosted by fellow late night TV veteran Jimmy Kimmel, O’Brien will join the roster of Hollywood actors and comedians who have taken on what is largely regarded as one of the most difficult and honestly thankless roles in show business: Oscars host. Just ask the likes of Anne Hathaway and James Franco how long the notoriety of a bad broadcast can continue to hang around. This will be the 97th Academy Awards, as the annual movie awards show creeps closer to its centennial mark, another hosting gig that will no doubt come with massive expectations. The show is set to broadcast Sunday, March 2, 2025 at 7 p.m. ET from the Dolby Theatre at Ovation Hollywood.
The Oscars have been fighting issues of declining viewership and interest for decades in an increasingly cord-cutting media landscape, but the broadcast still remains one of the largest and most-watched nights of the American TV year. O’Brien’s response to the announcement, meanwhile, is pretty much everything you’d want from the widely beloved late night TV host and podcast kingpin: “America demanded it and now it’s happening: Taco Bell’s new Cheesy Chalupa Supreme. In other news, I’m hosting the Oscars.”
The show’s executive producers, Raj Kapoor and Katy Mullan, meanwhile, put out the following statement: “Conan has all the qualities of a great Oscars host — he is incredibly witty, charismatic and funny and has proven himself to be a master of live event television. We are so looking forward to working with him to deliver a fresh, exciting and celebratory show for Hollywood’s biggest night.”
Fans of Conan O’Brien’s long and decorated broadcasting career will no doubt be hoping for some callbacks to his late night days, perhaps the revival of some beloved bits out of the past. Those shows included Late Night With Conan O’Brien and eventually The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien (briefly) for NBC, along with Conan on TBS. He now hosts the extremely popular Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast and starred in a recent travelogue series, Conan O’Brien Must Go. His career has been rife with awards, having received 31 Emmy nominations to date, including five wins. In a general sense, he is recognized as one of the most broadly popular and affable presences in American comedy, the kind of Oscars host to whom presumably no one will object. But never doubt the ability of people to object to something…
The actual awards, meanwhile, will likely reckon with the Academy’s lack of nominations for minorities, persons of color and women as they so often have in recent years, and it will be fascinating to see O’Brien take on the role of both guiding the ceremony and providing his own particular critique of it.