And your 2025 Oscars host is...
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Friday that Conan O'Brien has been tapped to host the 97th Academy Awards.
“America demanded it and now it’s happening: Taco Bell’s new Cheesy Chalupa Supreme. In other news, I’m hosting the Oscars,” O’Brien said in a statement Friday.
It will mark the first time the former late-night talk show host will emcee the Oscars, though he's hosted other award shows like the Emmy Awards in 2002 and 2006.
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The Oscars will air live on ABC on March 2, 2025.
O’Brien joins the list of Oscar hosts that includes Johnny Carson, Billy Crystal, David Letterman, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock, Jon Stewart, Hugh Jackman and Neil Patrick Harris.
“He joins an iconic roster of comedy greats who have served in this role, and we are so lucky to have him center stage for the Oscars,” said Craig Erwich, president, Disney Television Group.
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O’Brien is best known for hosting the late-night talk shows “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien” and “Conan.” Before his TV hosting career, O’Brien was a writer for “Saturday Night Live” and “The Simpsons.”
In 2009, after more than 15 years of hosting “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” on NBC, O’Brien was promoted to lead the network’s flagship late-night show after it was announced that Jay Leno would be given a new prime-time show, also on NBC. But after seven months of slipping “Tonight Show” ratings and and pressure from affiliates who said “The Jay Leno Show” wasn’t a strong enough lead-in to their nightly newscasts, NBC made a plan to shorten Leno’s show to a half-hour and give it a 11:35 p.m. timeslot, which would have bumped “The Tonight Show” to 12:05 a.m.
O'Brien refused to accept the move, and the public spat ended with O’Brien and his staff receiving a multimillion-dollar payout to exit NBC in early 2010. It would be 14 years before O'Brien returned to the network for an appearance on "The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon" in 2024.
However, O’Brien didn’t stay off the airwaves. He returned to late-night in November 2010 on basic-cable network TBS. “Conan” would run for nearly 11 years. (The first episode beat Leno’s “Tonight Show” in the ratings.)
In 2012, O’Brien told The Hollywood Reporter that while he still had latent resentment, he acknowledged a onetime “amazing partnership with NBC.”
As for O’Brien, he now hosts the podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend," and a new travel series “Conan O’Brien Must Go” for Max where he visits countries like Ireland, Thailand, Argentina and Norway.
