Photo: Carlo Allegri (Getty Images)

Finally, after a seemingly endless month of drama that has rocked Hollywood to its core, the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences has settled on what should’ve been a pretty obvious solution to its inability to find anyone willing to host the Oscars: Just do it without a host.

As reported by Variety, that’s exactly what’s going to happen at the Academy Awards on February 24, with the show putting an emphasis on “starry skits” and music instead of on a host’s banter and boring jokes. This hasn’t been officially announced by the Academy yet, but Variety hears that no new offers to potential hosts have been or will be made, so going hostless—as was rumored a few weeks ago—is pretty much the only option at this point.


If the Oscars does go without a host, it’ll only be the second time that has ever happened. The last one was in 1989, when producer Allan Carr decided to do a now-infamous musical number featuring Rob Lowe and Show White that lasted for a torturous 11 minutes. That seems like a bad omen. Variety says that media executives are also wary about the show going without a host, since it might be hard to convince viewers to tune in without a famous face popping up in all the commercials.

Given the disaster that the host search has become for the Academy, though, this seems like the only reasonable option. Kevin Hart took the job in early December, before almost immediately stepping down when the Academy dared to ask him to delete some old homophobic tweets, with Ellen DeGeneres eventually claiming that the Academy wanted Hart back and that we should all forgive him for saying awful things. Then, just this week, Hart conceded that he probably wasn’t going to get the call to host the Oscars, which was a weird thing for him to say since it would’ve been utterly absurd for the Academy to go back to him after all of this when it could just as easily do the show without a host, but at least cooler heads seem to have finally prevailed.