Will Kevin Hart ever host the Oscars?
The Academy Awards will have hosts again this year for the first time since comedian Kevin Hart was forced to step down due to a backlash for homophobic comments.
Comedian and actor Kevin Hart was selected to be the host of the 2019 Academy Awards ceremony but decided to pull out after facing a severe backlash.
Hart decided against hosting the Oscars after a number of homophobic Twitter posts from his past were uncovered, despite having initially insisted that he would not apologise for the old tweets.
Ever since then the Oscars has been host-less, primarily due to the social distant version that was required in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic. This year’s ceremony will be hosted by a trio: Wanda Sykes, Amy Schumer and Regina Hall.
It seems that there is no bad blood between Hart and the Academy for what happened in 2019 and there had been some talk that he might be offered the role again in the future. However in a recent interview with ET, Hart seemed to suggest that his chance of hosting the Oscars had passed.
"There was a moment where it made sense," he said. "Things happened ...and we all have moved on."
Why did Kevin Hart pull out of hosting the Oscars?
The controversy dates back to a series of tweets sent by Hart between July 2009 and January 2011 in which he displayed a distrust of LGBTQ people. The remarks included a joke about how Hart would react to finding out that his son was gay, which was criticised at the time but was only really put under the microscope after the comedian became a household name.
When asked about it in 2015, Hart admitted that he would not make the same jokes in the present day. He said: “I wouldn’t tell that joke today, because when I said it, the times weren’t as sensitive as they are now.”
However he stopped short of apologising for the remarks over a number of years and so, when he was announced as the host for the 2019 Oscars, the news was met with backlash. Hart then took to Instagram, posting a video in which he refused to apologise despite saying that the Academy had asked him to do so.
“I passed on the apology,” he said. “I’ve addressed this several times. This is not the first time this has come up. I’ve addressed it. I’ve spoken on it. I’ve said where the rights and wrongs were.”
Coming under increasing pressure to apologise and under greater scrutiny, Hart announced in December 2018 that he was stepping down as Oscars host. In a series of tweets he took the opportunity to “sincerely apologize to the LGBTQ community for my insensitive words from my past.”
In January 2019, just one month before the 91st Academy Awards was due to take place, Hart appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. In the course of the interview DeGeneres dismissed his critics as “haters” and asked him to reconsider hosting the event.
However the response to DeGeneres’ comments was not positive and a few days later, on 9 January, Hart confirmed that he will not host the event and that he no longer wanted to talk about the issue. He issued one final apology, saying that he “apologizes for his remarks that hurt members of the LGBTQ community. I apologize.”