Oscar Ceremony to Go Host-Less for Second Year in a Row, Pasadena Announcement Reveals

In Pasadena Wednesday, the president of ABC Entertainment said next month’s Oscar ceremony will be held without a host.

Speaking at the Television Critics Association’s meeting in Pasadena, Karey Burke said the network and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences jointly decided “there will be no traditional host” for the Feb. 9 ceremony.

She said the show will include “big musical numbers” and “star power.”

ABC and the Academy are looking to capitalize on a formula that led to an uptick in ratings last year, when the show went host-less following comedian Kevin Hart’s decision to drop out of the gig. Hart quit just two days after being named host when some previous homophobic Twitter posts and comments resurfaced.

Oscar nominations will be announced Monday morning.

Burke was in Pasadena at the Winter TV Press Tour 2020.

Over 220 TV journalists and critics from across the United States and Canada are gathering at the Langham Huntington Hotel in Pasadena starting Wednesday for the tour, which kicks off the upcoming TV season.

The TCA, a group representing professionals writing about television for print and online outlets in North America, holds the press tour twice a year to give full-time members the opportunity to gain access to the people who make television. Reporting during the press tours creates story material year-round as well as valuable face-to-face contacts with network executives, producers and actors.

At the Pasadena event, Apple TV+ is expected to introduce itself to the association as the newest streamer. Apple TV+ debuted in November as a subscription streaming service featuring Apple’s original TV shows and movies. The company’s TV app comes preloaded on hundreds of millions of iPhones.

Fox will be kicking off the network presentations Tuesday, with their top executives introducing upcoming programming and answering questions from TCA members during the tour.

ABC goes on Wednesday, followed by FX on January 9 and PBS on January 10, the TCA schedule showed.

NBCUniversal goes January 11 and CBS and CBS All Access take their turns January 12. Showtime and Pop will go on January 13, and CTAM, representing cable networks, struts its stuff January 14 to 19.

Over the next two weeks, the winter press tour would highlight many of the TV industry’s biggest issues for the upcoming season. Adweek, which regularly covers the event, predicts one of the biggest issues would be the role of the streaming TV services, with two more major streaming services set to enter the TV space.

Adweek reports NBCUniversal’s Peacock, named after the network’s logo, is launching in April, while WarnerMedia’s HBO Max follows a month later. And they will have a major impact not on the industry overall but their respective companies, which are increasingly shifting their priority from their linear networks to the new over-the-top offerings.

The other major issues Adweek predicts include how the Viacom-CBS merger, finalized in December, will be affecting the combined company’s networks, and what will be Disney’s long-term plans for Hulu which the company took full operational control of last May.

For more information about the Winter Press Tour, visit www.tvcritics.org.