On the morning of January 23, the 2025 Oscar nominees were announced by Bowen Yang and Rachel Senott. We learned that Emilia Perez had earned 13 nominations, a record breaker for any non-English film at the Oscars. We also learned that talk show host icon, previous Saturday Night Live head writer, and now infamous podcaster with an HBO travel show, Conan O’Brien, would host the Oscars on March 2, 2025.
This will mark the first time O’Brien is hosting the awards show and may prove to be a somewhat edgy choice considering his history of no-nonsense social criticisms.Â
In an exclusive interview with the New York Post, Jay Leno, who is currently promoting his new film “Midas Man” based on The Beatles manager Brian Epstein, revealed he was offered the Oscars host gig twice during his run as The Tonight Show host on NBC.Â
Though Leno congratulated Conan O’Brien for the contract, he seemed incapable of leaving the topic alone without offering up that he was asked first and turned it down due to his timeslot as Tonight Show host. This could perhaps be seen as a low blow by O’Brien’s camp, given the conflict between the two comedians in 2010 regarding the Tonight Show hosting gig where O’Brien was slated to take over the show from Leno but ended up having to leave the network entirely.Â
Leno told the New York Post about the conflict, “You know something, that whole thing was really NBC trying to have their cake and eat it too, trying to please everybody at the same time.” This may be true given the nature of the longwinded scheduling kerfuffle the network put the two hosts through during the brief period when O’Brien hosted The Tonight Show and Jay Leno hosted The Jay Leno Show. Yet, there is still some suspicion regarding Leno’s actions as Conan O’Brien was forced to leave the network, not Leno. In response, O’Brien started a late-night show with rival network TBS called Conan.Â
Of course, it has been 15 years since this unfortunate PR nightmare occurred for the two tenured hosts, and the two men may very well have buried the hatchet. However, Reddit is still full of theories regarding Leno’s Oscars comments:
Considering Conan O’Brien’s history with conflict, we may just have to wait until his opening monologue at the 2025 Oscars to hear what he thinks about all this. Or, he’ll ignore it entirely. Regardless, Jay Leno, like the rest of us, will likely be sitting in front of the TV waiting to find out.
Published: Jan 30, 2025 09:34 am