ABC will likely stick with hostless format at Oscars
And the winner is….a host-less Oscar telecast!
ABC Entertainment Chief Karey Burke told reporters Tuesday that it seems very likely ABC won’t worry itself with finding someone to host the next Academy Awards.
“You will not see us messing with that format to the best to our abilities,” said Burke. Though the awards show is “shaped throughout the year” by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, they were “unbelievably happy with the results [this year]. Hopefully we will have that same kind of success when we approach” the next one.
This year’s three-hour telecast on Feb. 24 averaged 29.6 million viewers — up 11 percent from last year’s telecast (26.5 million). It also earned a 7.7 rating among adults 18-49, up 13 percent versus last year’s show when The Shape of Water took home the night’s big prize, according to national results from Nielsen. ABC says it stands as TV’s most-watched entertainment telecast in two years, besting the 2017 telecast of the Oscars on Feb. 2, 2017 and NBC’s post-Super Bowl telecast of This is Us.
Reviews for the hostless three-hour, 17-minute show were positive. EW TV critic Kristen Baldwin gave it an A-. Mark Harris wrote in Vulture how “the lack of a host never felt acute or troubling (thank you, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Maya Rudolph, for taking care of our needs early and swiftly).” And THR said that “Sunday’s Oscars telecast definitely confirmed that under the right circumstances, a host isn’t a necessity.”
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