Conan O’Brien’s Amusing Emmys Hosting Gigs Showcase the Energy the Oscars Need

“And there’s the internet. At this very moment your kids are on YouTube watching a cat on a toilet. Instead of watching that footage where it belongs: On the Fox network!”

Conan O’Brien said that as part of his “Trouble at NBC” song-and-dance number at the 2006 Emmys, which enumerated the many challenges facing NBC, even though the awards show was airing on NBC. For this writer’s money, that entire Emmys broadcast was the most successful of this young century. And all thanks due to O’Brien’s whipsmart but never truly cynical energy. It’s a formula he should replicate at the 2025 Oscars, where the Academy just announced this morning that O’Brien will host.

There are some incredible lessons to learn from that 2006 Emmys ceremony, which was O’Brien’s second gig for TV‘s biggest night. The most important one is: He’s a TV fan, of TV in all its forms. His ambitious, “Sherlock Jr.”-style cold open was an extended skit cutting together multiple series, with O’Brien jumping into them — even filming on “The Office” set with John Krasinski, Jenna Fischer, and Steve Carell playing off him. He got there first by ostensibly flying to Los Angeles for his hosting gig, his plane crashing en route onto the “Lost” island, and then he climbed into “the hatch” and ended up at a certain Scranton paper company. Suddenly then he’s on a breathless CTU phone call with Mary-Lynn Rajskub’s Chloe and Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer. Then he’s examined by Dr. House. And ends up “Trapped in the Closet” in animated “South Park” form. And finally, he is cornered by Chris Hansen of “Dateline” in a parody of those peak-Aughts “To Catch a Predator” segments.

This is a guy who loves TV. And now, with his Oscar hosting, we get to see his love of movies as well.

There have been a lot of things wrong with the Oscar ceremonies in recent years, but the most disturbing one is the vibe, sometimes coming from the host, sometimes built into the ceremony structure itself, that the people behind the Oscars telecast don’t really care about movies — and certainly not the movies they’re actually honoring. They banished the Governors Award winners to a separate ceremony. They tried to award the Craft categories during commercial breaks. They tried a “Best Popular Film” category that was hijacked by Zack Snyder fans. And, in the hands of recent host Jimmy Kimmel, who even went so far as to bash the Academy on his late-night ABC show for not nominating “Spider-Man: No Way Home” for Best Picture, a sense that no one watches the nominated movies, no one cares about them, they haven’t shaken the zeitgeist.

In O’Brien’s hands, you’ll actually have a genuine movie lover. And a host who, among all the late night talk show hosts of the past few decades, has succeeded in embracing new media with his successful podcast, the blockbuster “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.” One who’s exceptionally gifted at responding to the moment and thinking on his feet. But who’s just as skilled at staging some incredible pre-written material. He should align well with producers Raj Kapoor and Katy Mullan, who return from producing 2024’s ceremony.

There’s one gag from the 2006 Emmys that absolutely shows what the Oscars need. Having already established his unqualified love of TV, O’Brien pivots to make fun of awards show bloat (and, perhaps even in a more meta way, network execs’ constant fretting about awards show bloat) by bringing Bob Newhart out in a glass booth that’s supposedly vacuum sealed. It had exactly three hours’ worth of air, the host said. “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s very simple. If the Emmys run one second over three hours, Bob Newhart dies. So keep those speeches short. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Newhart’s life is in your hands. Good luck and Godspeed, Bob. Take him away, fellas.”

This gag recurred throughout the evening, when the director would cut to Newhart’s deadpan face in reaction to some particularly silly scripted bit O’Brien had just done. It gave a unifying structure to the evening, each callback funnier than the last — and it even gave the winners something to remark on if they were at a loss for words. “We don’t want to drown that poor man, or suffocate him, buy-bye,” Blythe Danner said to wrap her speech after having won Best Supporting Actress in a Drama for “Huff.”

It was the same vibe another part of the night when O’Brien welcomed onto the stage the Ernst & Young accounting team who’d tabulated the results while legendary Chicago Bulls’ entry music “Sirius” by the Alan Parsons Project played in all its bombast. Taken together, all these bits showed someone who absolutely adores TV, while poking fun at awards show pomposity, and saving his darkest barbs for the network suits: “And the guy who passed on ‘Lost’ was promoted instead of tossed, and now the Peacock’s getting it from both ends,” he sang in his NBC diss-track. A little inside baseball, but of the sort that welcomes the viewers in to the proceedings, that makes outsiders feel like insiders. We were all there to celebrate TV and punch up at the bosses rather than act like the creators themselves had made work no one wants to see.

That kind of playfulness, not the “[shrug] no one cares about this stuff” attitude that like it or not has suffused the Oscars in recent years, is what we need at next year’s Academy Awards. It’s lost to the netherworld of Film Twitter now, but someone last year suggested using the steel-drum cover of “P.I.M.P.” from “Anatomy of a Fall” as the play-off music for winners whose speeches were going too long. Now that would have been funny! A dig at awards show conventions that actually shouts out a great movie. That’s exactly the sort of thing O’Brien could bring to his hosting in a few months. Don’t let us down, Coco.