Don’t expect Ellen to rescue Oscars
During the 2014 Oscors, host Ellen DeGeneres delivered pizza to Brad Pitt and Meryl Streep.
During her affable last turn as Academy Awards host, Ellen DeGeneres gave us pizza, Glinda and one of the most starstudded selfies ever.
But the daytime TV personality, who emceed the event in 2007 and 2014, has little interest in returning for a third time — even as the Academy scrambles to find a new host for the 2019 awards, following Kevin Hart’s dramatic exit last week.
“I don’t want to say ‘no,’ because I’ve said ‘no’ before and then I did,” DeGeneres tells USA TODAY. “But it’s probably a 99.9% no.”
Hart confirmed he was hosting February’s Oscar telecast on social media early last week, only to step down less than two days later, following outrage over his history of homophobic tweets and initial refusal to apologize for them.
DeGeneres declines to comment on Hart’s exit, saying she’d “just rather stay out of that whole thing.”
But in terms of who should replace him, “I think they should just have multiple hosts and multiple people introducing categories, because it’s not about the host anyway,” she said. “No matter how well you do, it’s really just about the performances and the awards.”
DeGeneres received generally positive reviews for both her stints hosting the Oscars. But she finds the job much more stressful than her current gig on her talk show, which she is considering ending when her contract is up in 2020.
DeGeneres said that as the Oscars show progresses, and there are more losers in the audience, the mood gets worse as it goes on. It’s just a tough gig.”